It is designed to provide a service-oriented architecture where every service is responsible for a different set of unique functionalities. All the services are designed in different technologies and scaled as per the requirements.
In case you would like to know more about how it’s different from the integrated monolithic architecture, you can check out Monolithic vs Microservices.
Once you have decided to go with Microservices architecture but are still not very confident to decide which technology/framework you should go for, then this article is for you.
Since Microservices have some specified needs like decoupled components, speed, security, flexibility & support, etc. Not all the frameworks or languages are the best fit for these kinds of architecture, So, selecting a relevant technology could always play a key role in your application health.
There are several micro frameworks available, and Lumen would be a good choice if you are interested in setting up your microservices’ ecosystem with PHP.
Lumen is a PHP-based micro-framework that is specially designed to fulfill every need for microservices-based applications. Lumen foundation is very similar to Laravel and powered with feature enriched loosely coupled components. If you would like to take benefits from Power of Laravel but have something more suitable for microservices, then Lumen would be a good choice for you.
Why Lumen?
There are several features that make Lumen a perfect choice for microservice development. Here we will discuss some key features of Lumen and check how is it a right fit?
Highest Performing Micro Framework
When we think about microservices architecture, Speed & Performance are the things that come to our mind. As per some online reliable information sources, Lumen is one of the fastest microframeworks. Here you can find the benchmarking comparison of some famous micro-frameworks available today.
Lumen comes with a predefined set of components that are required to build a performant scalable application. There might be other frameworks that provide better performance results with the basic setup but once you’ll start adding up the required dependencies it will slow down your application performance.
Simpler & Lightweight with the Power of Laravel
Since Lumen has the same foundation as Laravel, it provides the same cleaned directory structure that helps to organize your code to handle the console and HTTP-based requests separately in a clean way.
Also, it’s preloaded with some feature-rich components like Laravel but in Lumen, it’s only enabled and bootstrapped with required components for handling API requests.
Like, it’s disabled some unnecessary features for microservice patterns like templating, session handler, request caching, form requests, etc. If you would like to enable any of the features, it would be very easy like adding butter on the bread, you just have to follow some simpler steps to update the bootstrap file configuration and that feature would be ready to use.
Also, Jobs & Queue helps you process the asynchronous requests without keeping you in the wait for request processing.
As simple as you expected !!!
Flexibility
Plug & Use Third Party Packages
Lumen also follows PSR-4 autoloader rules to load the dependencies that make it very flexible to plug and use any standard PHP library. Since it’s loaded with the Composer, you may not be worried about upgrading/managing versions for dependencies.
CI/CD Deployment
There are some predefined commands available with Lumen that help to set up CI / CD pipelines easily with any popular code hosting site like GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, etc… For pre-deployment, apart from running composer dependencies, you can set to prepare the database schema with predefined value with its powerful Artisan commands available for migration & seed.
With the Laravel ecosystem, the Envoyer provides zero downtime deployment for Laravel / Lumen based applications having some minimal configurations and powerful commands. It may be helpful if you would like to save DevOps cost.
You can manage your application dependencies and deployment in the way you want !!!
Security
Like Laravel, Lumen is bundled with some great security features like Encryption, Hashing, Authentication, Authorization, etc…
Apart from these, it also provides an option to API request rate-limiting with throttle and can also define the trusted proxies/domain with configuration.
Lumen is also bundled with one of the powerful ORM-based features Eloquent that runs prepared statements and avoids the chances of any SQL Injection attacks.
There are also some configuration settings available to put your sensitive information in an environment file & you can keep any sensitive data out from publishing with code or logging information.
So it’s already following the first-hand security checks!!!
Support & Community
Laravel / Lumen is one of the best Open-source PHP-based frameworks available. The official repository has more than 7.3k stars and 960+ forks.
Laravel / Lumen follows the Semantic Versioning pattern for its first-party packages. Major framework releases are released every year (~January), while minor and patch releases may be released as often as every week.
It has a fast-growing community worldwide. And there are a ton of freely available packages.
Conclusion
Awesome! Now we are aware of some significant factors of Lumen like speed, security, flexibility, and most importantly the clean and light-weight structure. These key features should be considered while you are in the development phase where you need to select technology for a microservice.
Looking at the great offerings of Lumen, It’s not wrong to say that picking Lumen could be a good choice when you are going with the PHP tech stack.
Thank you for spending your valuable time and reading this guide. Welcoming your thoughts, comments are always open for discussion!!
