If you’re new to the world of microservices, read on for a quick overview of the benefits it will bring to your development efforts.
Microservices are an alternative approach to the monolithic architecture that has been the standard of software development for decades. Monolithic architectures have a long history of success and have been universally supported by many software vendors and industry experts. However, times change, and new technological developments emerge to prove more beneficial than what everybody seems to be used to.
In this article, we are going to dig into how microservices work, what makes them better than a monolithic application architecture, what flaws they may have, and how to deal with that. And last but not least – what companies have gone for the microservices architecture and never regretted it.
Microservices, or also known as a microservices architecture, are a modern software development technique and an architectural style applied to achieve business goals through decomposing an interdependent software system into smaller, more autonomous units. These modules work together and communicate with one another but are deployed independently. With the microservice architecture, developers can create separate modules that would work as a selection of individual services. Together, they also ensure the application can be highly performant while supporting its full-featured functionality.
Ideally, a microservice-based application should have multiple independent components – each responsible for a specific function – that are distributed, secured, and kept in sync via various communication channels. Each component should stay in touch with all other components in order to fully understand and support all network activities and future needs of the system. Therefore, it is a common practice to split one project team into smaller teams, each involved in the development of a single microservice.
When we talk about a monolithic application, the technology stack may be as varied, balanced, and complex as it is required to satisfy specific business needs on a particular project. However, even if the monolithic app follows service-oriented architecture, these services can grow with time to become globs supporting dozens of functionalities.
In turn, when developing a microservice-based app, the team will most probably need to prioritize product mentality over the project itself. This means the product must consist of microservices that should have few functionalities to support throughout the whole project’s existence.
For microservices to work harmoniously with one another, the development team has to set up a structure in which direct and fast communication is established. Therefore, from what has been said here, it follows that – no matter whether you’re developing a microservices-based app from scratch or converting an existing monolith – the basic technologies needed to build an application with a microservices-based architecture are going to be more or less the same:
Using the microservices architectural style is something beyond splitting services in a monolith. Therefore, the number of cases, in which it is generally recommended to implement, is larger than it may seem first. For many, microservices are a new concept, and some may not understand upfront the innovation that they suggest. So, let us clarify and say that microservices are a good idea:
Many organizations, whose applications have been previously based on a monolithic architecture, are now moving them to microservices exactly because the advantages of a microservices architecture have already been proven and realized by other players on the global field.
The benefits of the microservices architecture include continuous delivery and deployment, better scalability, improved fault isolation, greater flexibility, smaller development teams, higher software testability, and improved maintainability.
1. Continuous delivery and deployment - This is a big plus, especially in the case of large, complex applications. Continuous delivery and deployment are two critical components of an effective software development process. And for microservices architectures, where apps work as suites of independently deployable services, they become particularly important. As the microservice architecture gives the project team the freedom to develop and deploy services separately from one another, the capabilities derived from continuous delivery and deployment help the team get any changes into production in a safe and sustainable manner. These practices are more easily implemented with the microservices-based than monolithic architecture. As a result, deliverable throughput and resource utilization are considerably improved.
2. Better scalability - Microservices are far more scalable than a monolith. Although different microservices in a system may have different resource requirements and performance limitations, compared to a monolith, they still are relatively small, so they are easier to scale and integrate with third-party services. And despite the fact that such ecosystems are usually large-scale and distributed, they are at the same time concurrent. Concurrency is a significant characteristic of a scalable application, and microservice ecosystems allow for that. This way, tasks are broken up into smaller sub-tasks and processed in parallel within the microservice architecture. As a result, they are executed much faster than if they were implemented in a monolithic application, which, in turn, enables and supports a scalable deployment pipeline.
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