Health checks, load balancing, and efficient gateway routing

Depending on business requirements, the microservice instance can start, restart, stop on some failure, run low on memory, and auto-scale, which may make it temporarily or permanently unavailable. Therefore, the architecture and framework should be designed accordingly. For example, a Node.js server, being single-threaded, stops immediately in the case of failure, but using graceful tools such as PM2 forever keeps them running. A gateway should be introduced that will be the only point of contact for the microservice consumer. The gateway can be a load balancer that should skip unhealthy microservices instances. The load balancer should be able to collect health information metrics and route traffic accordingly, it should smartly analyze the traffic on any particular microservice, and it should trigger auto-scaling if needed.