Building Microservices Architecture with Ruby on Rails

Building Microservices Architecture with Ruby on Rails

As applications scale in complexity, breaking them into microservices becomes a practical approach. This document outlines how to implement a microservices architecture using Ruby on Rails, with:

A central API Gateway for authentication and routing
Token-based authentication
A shared Utilities Gem for reusable code and models
A Rails UI app communicating only with the gateway

🧱 Architecture Overview

This Rails-based microservices setup consists of:

API Gateway – Central entry point handling authentication and routing
Domain Microservices – Rails API-only apps for each business domain
Shared Utilities Gem – Reusable code packaged as a Ruby gem
Frontend UI App – A Rails app consuming only gateway APIs

This modular approach allows scalability, isolated deployments, and team autonomy.

🔐 API Gateway

The API Gateway is a lightweight Rails application responsible for:

Authenticating requests (API token or JWT)
Managing sessions and authorization
Routing traffic to relevant microservices
Providing consistent error responses, logging, and rate-limiting

It helps ensure security is centralized and consistent across all services.

🔄 Token-Based Authentication

Token-based authentication allows secure, stateless communication:

Tokens (e.g., JWTs) are issued by the Gateway
They include claims such as user ID, role, and expiry
Every request must include the token in the header
The gateway verifies and extracts user context from the token

This method scales well, supports mobile/web clients, and doesn’t require session storage.

📦 Microservice Utilities Gem

To avoid duplication across services, a custom Ruby gem is created that includes:

Shared ActiveRecord models (like User, Organization)
Common concerns (auditing, soft deletes, timestamps)
Utilities for token validation, permission checks, formatting
Shared serializers and config

Each microservice includes this gem to ensure consistent behavior and coding patterns.

🧩 Domain Microservices

Each domain-specific microservice is built as a Rails API-only app.

Examples include:

User Service: authentication, roles, permissions
Billing Service: subscriptions, invoices
Analytics Service: metrics, events

Key characteristics:

Owns its own database
Encapsulates its business logic
Interacts with other services via HTTP or background queues
Follows contracts defined by the shared gem and gateway

🎨 Rails UI App

The Rails-based UI application focuses on frontend concerns only:

Talks only to the API Gateway
Gets token-based session context from the gateway
Delegates business logic to backend microservices
Can easily be replaced with React, mobile, or SPA apps in future

This ensures the UI remains decoupled from backend complexities.

🛠️ Benefits

FeatureBenefitCentralized Security | Token auth and routing handled at the gateway
Code Reuse | Shared gem avoids duplicating models and logic
Scalable Deployments | Each service can be updated independently
Team Autonomy | Teams can own and deploy services without coordination bottlenecks
Simplified Frontend | The UI is a thin layer consuming APIs, easy to evolve or replace

✅ Conclusion

Using Rails to implement a microservices architecture is both practical and productive. This approach offers:

Centralized auth and token handling
Modular, independently deployable services
Shared code and conventions via a utilities gem
A simple, token-driven Rails UI app

This architecture balances the elegance of Rails with the flexibility of service-based systems — making it ideal for growing, modern applications.

#API Gateway, Token Auth, and Shared Utils 🇬🇧

Building Microservices Architecture with Ruby on Rails