Selecting a Cloud Native Microservice Framework

A common question that arises when developing new services, cloud native services and microservices is; “in which language will we develop this functionality?”. Even though microservices can in theory be all build in different languages a number of considerations need to be made both on a project level as well as an enterprise architecture level.

Development language to select

As an enterprise you do not want to maintain to many programming languages. Each individual programming language comes with a cost, a cost of recruiting and maintaining skills, a cost for ensuring the proper tooling is in place, a cost to ensure the correct test and build pipelines are available and maintained and not in the last place a cost of maintaining security in relation to the programming language used.

Development framework to select

In addition to the above, considerations about maturity and the availability of microservice frameworks come to mind. As you want the language you are going to use to be rich, well supported and having a thriving community around it this can dictate choices. A more complete list of things to consider when selecting a framework can include; popularity, maturity of the community, ease of development, learning curve, architecture support, automation support, level of independent deployment and ability to embed in a CI/CD pipeline.