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I'm currently developing a project in Node JS that uses microservices architecture, in which each service has it's own repository that contains both the code for the service itself (NodeJS express server), and also an SDK file that I publish for other services to use with methods that are available in this service and Typescript definitions.

So for instance I have a users-service that handles all of the user related actions, and a reports-service that handles all of the reports that users can CRUD. users-service has a method called "deleteUser" that also goes to reports-service SDK in order to delete all of this user reports. On the other hand reports-service uses user-service SDK to "getUserById" for instance. So what happens is that user-service has reports-service-sdk as one of it's dependencies, and reports-service has users-service-sdk as one of its dependencies. Because the SDK is inside the same npm module with the service, I get users-service-sdk as one of the dependencies of users-service.

I thought of separating the SDK with a different package.json file, but I wanted to know if it's the right way to go or am I doing something really wrong in my architecture :)

Thanks.

Yaniv Shiloah
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This sounds like Circular Dependency which as you stated in the title is tough to deal with. Microservices are great but this sort of architecture sounds like a lot of extra unnecessary work without any added benefit.

You should look into running your services/packages/repositories as Cloud functions (or Firebase functions). AWS also has their own solution for microservices architecture. The reason being is each service can communicate with other services by using internal authorized calls or authorized REST API calls --- or you can make them totally public.

The great thing about these Google Cloud Functions is each function is automatically an Express end-point that accepts GET, POST, DELETE, PUT. Or if you use the internal call for Firebase, each function automatically contains relevant context from the frontend (such as the user's authentication details).

You also configure IAM permissions to only allow who and what service you want to be able to execute your cloud functions so that you have full control of permissions.

To answer your questions directly though, I would definitely avoid Package A having Package B as a dependency as Package B has Package A as a dependency. You absolutely can make that work but there's no upside and a lot of downside.

Here's an old thread which covers the topic.

Wesley LeMahieu
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