The advantage of microservices is that it enables the IT teams throughout the businesses to build applications for their specific function or customer. It can do so by providing them with solutions by following the best practices provided by central IT.
For all of these microservices to function, they need to be integrated and connected to central data stores. The problem with a point to point integration is that as those connections proliferate, if one system breaks everything breaks and becomes fragile and brittle. This fragility leads to risk aversion and leaving the businesses with a need to innovate.
One of the most important security principles is to ensure that any microservice is well defined, well-documented and standardized. In order for an API to provide a secure and well-defined access point to a microservice, it must have the following characteristics: confidentiality, integrity, availability, reliability. But it’s vital that each microservice and its API access point have built-in mechanisms for visibility and security. For example, an e-commerce platform will have multiple microservices, like order collection, account recovery, account accesses, and inventory management (including shipping). Big companies like Amazon, eBay, Netflix, Twitter rely totally on microservices to make their e-commerce stores a success story.
An API is secure when it can guarantee the confidentiality of the information it processes by making it evident only to its users, apps, and servers that are given permission to consume it.
Tips to Enhance Microservices Security for Better Performance
Follow the Concept of ‘Defense in Depth’
To secure your microservices, it would make sense to build fine-grained firewalls between services so that containers can have safe dividers between the various services provided.
Enforce APIs for Enhanced Security
Diversifying security tactics and not keeping the same pattern for security codes, by ensuring well built APIs use features like throttling, access tokens, authentication can be enforced when the time arises.
Use the Encryption Strategy Best for Your Network
HTTPS transport security is the best way to protect data in transit. Data related to microservices is encrypted at rest applying robust encryption algorithms.
Limit Accesses to Immediate Users
Security is all about allowing the right people into a system. If you have a lot of components that need specialized skills, then you need to limit access to the bare minimum. Limit access to everyone working in the program.
Use Automation for Best Results
Manual efforts are not acceptable in this world of competition. The more the manual efforts involved, the more constricted would be the interest in the program. Speed up the process and remove all manual efforts because automation is the key to success.
Make Testing a Recurring Feature
Microservices promotes Agile development methodologies, which can be used for the rapid deployment of new and improved services.