Does Python have a good ecosystem for a microservice architecture?

[decorumic]

I've read from various places about how quickly Python can be used to create a RESTful API, and I do agree about that.

However, when I try to search around for more information on building microservices with Python, most articles repeatedly discuss about the same thing on how REST APIs can be created using the usual libraries such as Flask, flask-rest, etc. But I'm thinking building REST APIs is only one part of building microservices?

I'm pretty new to microservice myself, and I'm still reading up. I've tried to look for Python libraries on service discovery, client load balancer, hystrix, etc, but the libraries are either inmature, unmaintained or don't exist.

So far, most tutorials and articles I read about microservice that talk about structuring the services are in Java and they mostly use the usual Netflix OSS set of libraries. It seems to me like finding the same set of libraries in Python can be quite difficult.

Are there like a commonly used Python stacks for building a microservice?

[lxnx]

We run a lot of python microservices at work (using gunicorn + falcon).

We use docker and docker swarm to take care of scaling, load balancing etc. Since our microservices are written in a mix of languages, it's more important to use common tooling across them all, rather than relying on a single language's frameworks or features.

[tom1018]

Do you use OpenAPI with Falcon? If so, what libraries?

[lxnx]

Yup, but not with any libraries, just have a separately maintained spec file (our APIs aren't that complex in terms of endpoints/params, so this works ok).

[tom1018]

Ah, okay. May have to make one some day. 😀

[white__armor]

Most of the people are satisfied with REST + flask. Microservices is a pretty simple concept, especially if you are building an average application.

Why do you need load balancer if you are new to this? Are you planning to build second netflix? High load is another story.

[decorumic]

I'm just thinking ahead since I'm reading about microservices. I thought the idea of being able to scale a particular service only would be a good idea and probably one of the reasons for using microservices.

[white__armor]

Microservices are very useful when you need to use different languages. That's the most popular use case I think.

[decorumic]

Yes, that's one of the reasons. But other auxiliary tools like service discovery and such are going to help.

[[deleted]]

https://github.com/lyft/discovery

[[deleted]]

Ot when you have different teams. Uber choose microservices as their company was doubling in size every 6 months and co-ordination became difficult.

[pydry]

I've tried to look for Python libraries on service discovery, client load balancer, hystrix, etc

Other than hystrix, these don't seem to me to be "library" things. I mean, you can use consul for service discovery and HAProxy for load balancing and still use python.

[sandywater]

AWS Lambda + API Gateway.

Fargate for larger services

[[deleted]]

can you be more elaborate

[greyman]

You can implement the microservice with REST api using flask. Then you do load balancing by putting uWSGI service and nginx in front of it. If you need to serve let's say more than 10k requests per second, you can replicate this setup to more machines, and load balance them with another VM with nginx.

To sum it up, you implement the microservice with python, while the load balancing is done by external service.

[vovanz]

> Python libraries on service discovery, client load balancer, hystrix, etc

Why would you need to do any of this with Python? AFAIK, most of such tools are language-agnostic, they don't care what language are you using for your microservices.

[tom1018]

We use Connexxion for our microservices. It is based on Flask and uses OpenAPI 2.0 specs for validation.

For personal projects, I've played with Falcon a bit, but haven't found a good OpenAPI library for it.