Why I believe I have made the right decision choosing microservices.
The success stories and concepts surrounding Microservices are very fascinating. A lean architecture is formed by a collection of services, each of which does one item in the business domain. However, we must remember that these services must collaborate in order to provide economic value to their end-users.
Microservices (or microservices architecture) is a cloud native architectural approach that consists of several loosely connected and independently deployable smaller components, or services. Typically, these services
- possess its own technology stack, which includes a database and data management model;
- REST APIs, event streaming, and message brokers are used to communicate with one another. and
- are grouped by business capability, with a delimited context denoting the boundary between services.
Simply said, microservices are another another architectural option for developing complex – primarily web-based – programmes. Microservices have grown in popularity as a natural progression from SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), a method for overcoming the drawbacks of old monolithic architectures. In this blog post, we’ll look at the movement of development from monolithic architectures to microservices, as well as the reasons for this shift and the benefits and drawbacks of microservices.
Advantages of microservices
The benefits of microservices appear to be compelling enough to have persuaded some major corporations, like Amazon, Netflix, and eBay, to adopt the concept. Compared to more monolithic design structures, microservices offer:
- Improved fault isolation: The failure of a single module can have little impact on larger applications.
- Remove vendor or technological entanglement: Microservices give you the freedom to experiment with different technology stacks on a per-service basis. There will be fewer dependencies to worry about, and reverting changes will be considerably easier. There is more freedom when there is less code in play.
- Ease of understanding: Developers can better comprehend the functionality of a service if it is made simpler.
- Deployments that are smaller and faster: smaller codebases and scopes result in faster deployments, allowing you to begin to investigate the advantages of Continuous formation.
- Scalability: Because your services are discreet, you may grow the most critical ones at the right moments rather than the entire programmer. This can result in cost savings if done appropriately.
Disadvantages of microservices
Microservices are a popular concept, however the design has flaws. The biggest disadvantage of microservices is the inherent complexity of any distribution system.
Here’s a rundown of some of the potential pain points and other drawbacks of microservices architecture:
- It’s difficult to communicate between services: You must properly handle requests moving between your modules now that everything is an independent service. To avoid disturbance, developers may be required to implement additional code in one case. When distant calls endure latency, difficulties will occur over time.
- Testing on a global scale is difficult: It can be difficult to test a microservices-based application. In a monolithic approach, all we’d have to do is run our WAR on an application server and make sure it was connected to the database. Before testing can begin with microservices, each dependent service must be confirmed.
- Challengers to deployment: It’s possible that the product will require coordination across different services, which won’t be as simple as putting a WAR in a container.
- Large VS small product companies: Microservices are fantastic for large firms, but they can be difficult to develop and maintain for small businesses that need to create and iterate rapidly without becoming bogged down in sophisticated orchestration.
Of course, all of the above flaws may be remedied with the right automation and tools, as well as properly trained personnel.
What is the best way to proceed with microservices?
The debate over whether to use microservices or traditional monolithic architectures will only get more acute as application development patterns shift. Finally, developers must do their homework and figure out what works best for their individual use cases.
Starting with a monolithic application can be simpler, faster, and less expensive for smaller businesses, and if the product isn’t too mature, it can still be converted to microservices at a later date. Microservices are clearly the best use case for large enterprises with millions of users, as they require the uptime and scalability that increased modularity can deliver.
A strategy for migrating from a monolithic architecture to a microservices architecture
This is a large issue that warrants its own blog article. Your transformation will require time and devotion, just as Rome was not built in a day. In a nutshell, you must complete the following tasks:
- As the number of services grows, adopt continuous delivery to ensure that you have the proper automation in place.
- To allow teams to work separately without tripping on one other, switch to a distributed source control system.
- Dockerize your program for mobility and the flexibility to spin up and down services in a matter of seconds.
- Create new functionality as a microservice wherever possible.
- Gradually convert existing components, starting with the simplest business functions with the fewest dependencies and progressing to more complicated ones.
Conclusion
In comparison to monolithic software architecture, creating and executing Microservice Architecture is difficult and necessitates a paradigm shift. Similarly, Microservice Architecture isn’t a magic bullet that can fix all of an application’s complexity challenges.
Taking everything into account, I feel Microservice Architecture is an extremely valuable and practical tool for current software development. Microservice Architecture is the only option for huge enterprises that generally build complicated software to deal with complexity and remain competitive in the market. Microservice Architecture should also be utilized by small and medium businesses for long-term software development.
It’s worth noting that due to their Microservice Architecture, early adopters of Microservice Architecture (Spotify, Netflix, LinkedIn, Amazon, and Google) were able to gain major competitive advantages over their competitors.
As you can see, implementing microservices is not simple and should only be done if you believe they will provide value to your applications.
