Building a multi-service application can be an expensive and complex undertaking if you try to manage all the underlying infrastructure yourself. Maintaining multiple servers, databases, development environments and scaling everything as your userbase grows quickly becomes a drain on resources.
As an entrepreneur or startup, you likely don’t have unlimited funds to invest in building robust infrastructure from scratch. Your priority is focusing on developing features for your application and acquiring users rather than worrying about server configurations or capacity planning.
This is where cloud computing provides a cost-effective solution. By leveraging fully-managed cloud services, you can develop and run a sophisticated multi-service application without the upfront costs of buying and maintaining physical hardware. You only pay for the exact resources your application consumes, avoiding expensive over-provisioning.
This guide will explain how popular cloud platforms can help you build powerful multi-service applications in the cloud without compromising on functionality or breaking your budget. We’ll cover key services for deploying backend code, storing and accessing data, building APIs, implementing authentication and securing everything in the cloud.
What is a Multi-Service Application?
A multi-service application can be defined as a software system that delivers multiple distinct functionalities or services through a unified interface. Rather than being a single monolithic program, it consists of several discrete yet interconnected microservices.
Some examples of prominent multi-service applications include:
- Facebook – Provides social networking, messaging, photo/video sharing, events, pages, groups and marketplace features.
- Amazon – Enables ecommerce, marketplace, payments, logistics, web services, productivity and entertainment offerings.
- Uber – Integrates ride-hailing, food delivery, freight transportation and urban transportation solutions.
The strength of a multi-service model lies in its scalability, flexibility and ability to reuse services across different applications. For example, a login service can authenticate users for multiple products rather than duplicating code. Developers can also independently modify or upgrade individual services without disrupting the whole system.
Challenges of Building a Multi-Service Application
While offering clear advantages, developing and maintaining a multi-service application poses unique technical challenges:
Developing & Integrating Many Services
Building the required functionality involves designing, coding and testing a multitude of distinct but cooperating microservices from scratch. Their complex interactions must be flawlessly orchestrated.
High Upfront Infrastructure Investment
Procuring servers, storage, databases and other resources for all services at initial development involves huge capital outlay. Considerable funds and effort are spent before any revenue generation.
Ongoing Maintenance & Scaling Costs
Physical servers and databases must be configured, patched, upgraded and expanded as application usage grows over time. Scaling piecemeal for each service independently drives up operational expenses. Checkout Zipprr: https://zipprr.com/gojek-clone/
Difficult Performance & Failure Management
Ensuring peak performance across the entire system comprising many discrete parts becomes challenging. Isolating failures and troubleshooting issues across services is laborious.
Expensive Development Environment Setup
Setting up isolated yet connected development, testing, staging and production environments identical to the cloud infrastructure is a painful task requiring extensive hardware resources.
Clearly, establishing and scaling such a sophisticated, multi-faceted system through do-it-yourself on-premise data centers is a considerable financial and administrative burden for most startups and resource-constrained teams.
Benefits of Cloud Computing
The cloud offers an elegant way out of these difficulties by providing on-demand access to fully-managed infrastructure services. Its key advantages include:
No Upfront Hardware Investment
Developers can immediately start building applications without procuring any physical servers, databases or storage. Pay only for actual usage on an hourly/monthly basis.
Automatic Scalability
Applications seamlessly scale out and in based on traffic without capacity planning hassles. No need to periodically upgrade hardware or manually add resources.
Usage-based Pricing
Cloud billing closely tracks resource consumption at fine-grained intervals. Only pay for what’s used rather than maintaining costly idle/unused capacity.
Global Availability
Services are available on cloud platforms’ international networks of reliable data centers delivering consistent performance worldwide.
Streamlined Maintenance
Vendors apply OS/framework patches, hardware life cycles are abstracted away. Teams focus only on application management sans physical infrastructure worries.
Identical Development Environments
Developers can freely experiment on cloned staging environments matching production configuration before code promotions.
By leveraging these shared infrastructure services delivered over the internet on a pay-as-you-go model, building robust yet economical multi-service applications becomes achievable even for bootstrapped ventures.
Cloud Platforms for Multi-Service Apps
The three main cloud platforms that support developing sophisticated multi-service applications at scale are:
AWS (Amazon Web Services)
The earliest and most comprehensive cloud platform. Key services include EC2, Lambda, S3, DynamoDB, RDS, ElastiCache, API Gateway etc.
GCP (Google Cloud Platform)
Enterprise-grade infrastructure services from Google like Compute Engine, Cloud Functions, Storage, Datastore, Cloud SQL, Apigee etc.
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft’s cloud offering AWS and GCP alternatives like VMs, Web Apps, SQL Database, Azure Functions, Blob Storage, API Management etc.
While all three provide comparable features, differences in pricing models, service availability and tooling exist. Teams should evaluate which platform best aligns with their requirements and development tools/skills. Hybrid/multi-cloud deployments are also feasible.
In next sections, we’ll explore specific cloud services that together enable development and operation of fully-functional multi-service applications economically across these platforms.
Compute Services for Running App Code
At their core, multi-service apps require scalable and highly available infrastructure to run application backend code as independent services. Key cloud compute services for this purpose include:
AWS EC2
Elastic Compute Cloud offers scalable VMs for deploying and running microservices. Support auto-scaling without capacity planning hassles.
GCP Compute Engine
Managed VMs delivering flexible, scalable compute resources on Google infrastructure worldwide.
Azure Virtual Machines
IaaS VMs for building and hosting scalable server applications across global Azure data centers.
Serverless Compute
AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions and Azure Functions provide event-driven compute without server management. Best for building microservices with lightweight, ephemeral workloads.
PaaS Hosting
AWS Elastic Beanstalk, GCP App Engine, Azure App Service simplify deployment to scalable hosting environments for traditional web applications.
Combined withDevOps practices like CI/CD pipelines, developers can deploy interconnected service code automatically across these platforms’ pay-as-you-go compute resources.
Database Services for App Data
Every multi-service system requires fast, stable storage and querying of structured and unstructured data at petabyte scales. Major cloud databases include:
Relational Databases
- AWS RDS – Manage popular MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server and Oracle DB instances.
- Google Cloud SQL – Fully managed MySQL and PostgreSQL databases.
- Azure SQL Database – Powerful SQL databases in the cloud.
NoSQL Document Databases
- AWS DynamoDB – Fast and flexible NoSQL database service with solid APIs.
- Google Cloud Datastore – Scalable schemaless data storage for non-relational data.
- Azure Cosmos DB – Globally distributed multi-model database for any scale.
Managed Cache/Search
- ElastiCache – Memcached and Redis compatible in-memory data stores.
- Amazon ES – Hosted Elasticsearch for search and analytics workloads.
- Alloys – Managed search service on Elasticsearch/Solr for apps.
These databases auto-replicate data across regions, need minimal admin while scaling massively on demand. Integrate seamlessly with other app services.
Storage Services for Files/Media
Building a robust storage substrate is key for multi-service applications that handle large file uploads like photos/videos. Major cloud storage options are:
Object Storage
- AWS S3 – Scalable object storage delivers 99.99% durability for any type of file.
- Google Cloud Storage – Petabyte-scale durable unlimited storage for any file sizes.
- Azure Blob Storage – Store massive amounts of unstructured data like text/binary files in the cloud.
File Storage
- EFS on AWS – Fully managed network file system for sharing files between EC2 instances.
- Google Filestore – Fully managed NFS file shares for POSIX applications and servers.
- Azure Files – Cloud file shares accessed via the standard SMB protocol.
These services provide durable storage at a fraction of on-premise costs while integrating well with databases and compute via open APIs.
API Management Services
APIs are the backbone of multi-service applications facilitating intercommunication between discrete parts. Major public API management services are:
AWS API Gateway
Fully managed service to publish, maintain, monitor APIs at any scale. Flexible access control, automatic scaling and extensive analytics.
Developer Tools Integration
Developing interconnected microservices across various platforms and clouds requires tight integration between developer tools and infrastructure services. Popular cloud vendors provide:
- SDKs and CLI tools to automate workflows like provisioning, deployment, monitoring etc. through code.
- Tight source control system integrations for workflows spanning development, testing and production.
- IDE/editor plugins for direct development against cloud resources within the IDE.
- Debugging and monitoring tools for distributed tracing, logging, profiling microservices running on clouds.
For AWS, these include AWS CLI, AWS SDKs, AWS Code Commit/Code Pipeline/Code Build integrations. GCP has gcloud CLI, Cloud SDKs and Git integrations. Azure provides Azure CLI, SDKs and DevOps integrations.
Combined with CI/CD pipelines and immutable infrastructure practices, developer productivity can be maximized through these tools.
Authentication and Authorization
Adding user accounts and security to a multi-service system requires centralized yet flexible identity and access management. Popular cloud identity services are:
- AWS Cognito – Simple login/signup and user management for web/mobile with SSO options.
- Firebase Authentication – Authentication made easy with built-in UI libraries for web/mobile.
- Azure Active Directory – Synchronize user identities between on-premise directories and Azure AD.
- Google Cloud Identity Platform – Build apps with robust and compliant social login from Google IAP.
Once authenticated, users need appropriate access levels to services. Commonly used authorization services are:
- AWS IAM – Fine-grained access control of AWS resources through user roles and policies.
- Google IAM – Similarly control access to GCP services and resources via roles.
- Azure RBAC (Role Based Access Control) – Administer authorization at varying scopes down to individual resources.
These managed identity and access services drastically simplify security for multi-service applications.
Monitoring and Optimization
Maintaining high availability and peak performance across a distributed system demands proactive monitoring of all interconnected services. Major cloud observability services include:
- AWS CloudWatch – Collect metrics/logs, set alarms from all AWS & EC2 resources for real-time monitoring.
- Google Stackdriver – Application performance monitoring for workloads on GCP via logs/metrics analysis.
- Azure Application Insights – Collect telemetry from web/mobile/serverless apps to diagnose issues fast.
- Datadog – Hosted monitoring solution for infrastructure/applications across hybrid cloud environments.
- NewRelic – Comprehensive monitoring for apps, servers, databases with distributed tracing across services.
Combined with application metrics, these services aid rapid debugging and capacity planning for multi-service architecture under heavy load.
Security Best Practices
Ensuring security and compliance must remain top priority, especially for sensitive user applications. Some key controls are:
- Network Security – VPC/VNet segmentation, firewall rules, load balancing, TLS between services.
- Encryption – Data at rest (databases), transit (APIs) and multi-factor/federated login.
- Identity & Access Management – Least privilege principle, mandatory access reviews, federated SSO.
- Logging & Auditing – Centralized CloudTrail, logs exported to SIEM for detection & forensics.
- Vulnerability Management – Scanning APIs, codebases, assets for misconfigurations, bugs and unauthorized access.
- Incident Response – Automated alerts, WAR rooms, integration with security teams for issues.
Adhering to security best practices is mandatory for enterprises building multi-service applications on the cloud at scale.
Conclusion
In summary, cloud platforms offer a highly scalable and cost-effective way to launch sophisticated multi-service applications without substantial upfront infrastructure investment. Their fully-managed PaaS services alleviate the burden of procuring, integrating and maintaining servers, databases, networking and other elements required traditionally.
Global cloud providers like AWS, GCP and Azure provide all the building blocks – computing, storage, databases, APIs, authentication, monitoring and security controls required to develop dynamic, interconnected web and mobile applications resilient to unpredictable traffic.
By leveraging shared cloud infrastructure on demand, even ambitious projects involving many discrete yet interlinked services can be implemented on reasonable budgets through consumption-based pricing models. This allows focus to shift from operational complexities to building great user experiences.
The cloud truly provides a launchpad for new ideas and ambitious multi-service applications that previously seemed infeasible due to expense and shortage of on-premise resources. By abstracting away physical hardware management in favor of code-based provisioning and automation, it has transformed how massively scalable applications are devised and delivered.