As business evolves, so does the software it relies on, and in many cases, the evolution process is not quite smooth.
The constant need for updates often turn the applications into monolithic monsters that over time are harder and harder to understand, update and maintain.
But even a quick look at some of the benefits of Microservice Architecture shows that the complications mentioned above can be avoided efficiently.
The following article will describe how designing or redesigning your software into Microservices Architecture might save you from having to deal with those problems and create a benefit to your business.
First of all, here’s a little introduction of what Microservices Architecture is.
As a more wide-spread definition states,
it is an architectural style that structures an application as a collection of loosely coupled services, which implement business capabilities.
In other words, it is a way of breaking up monolithic software into various components that can
Though it is not an ultimate solution to every problem, it can really improve the overall quality of software and prevent many problems connected to updating, maintaining, and deploying large applications when applied by professionals and through careful consideration of business requirements.
Let’s dive right into how breaking up your software might benefit your business:
To say very roughly what “implementing the business capabilities” means for a software, let’s imagine – your business offers a product, for which clients pay and receive the product at their door.
In an ideal Microservice Architecture, you would have a payment service and shipment service deployed separately and communicating with each other through an API.
This kind of approach makes the whole design of the software better understandable and explainable for even a non-technical person.
It also makes it easier for developers to understand the specific functions of the service by concentrating on particular aspects of the software without worrying about other parts of it.
One of the best benefits you might get from correctly implementing Microservices Architecture is that your software doesn’t stop working entirely just because there is a bug (or a badly designed feature) in one of its functional elements.
Distributing specific functions to separately deployed services gives developers better chances of identifying the problem quickly and solving it without meddling with other parts of the application.
After solving the issue, there is no need to deploy the whole application, just the service that is responsible for the error.
Also, failing of one service doesn’t necessarily mean that the function the service performed is not available anymore because in most of the cases services are scaled.
In other words, duplicated, so if there is some hardware or memory or another kind of problem for one specific service, its twin brothers continue to work.
Both this and above benefit leads us to another one, which is:
Business benefits of Microservices Architecture include less energy spent on understanding separate pieces of software, less sweat on worrying about how the latest bug-fix will affect other parts of the product, less fear of breaking the application when deploying the latest tweaks.
Implementing different business requirements as different services and making them loosely coupled, i.e. less dependent on each other means that updating one of them is made much easier.
Whereas, updating one functionality of the monolithic architecture means meddling other parts of the business logic, which are not directly connected to the feature in question.
And if this feature doesn’t fit in any of already existing services, just invent another one and let it talk to the others.
Real life problems can be a little bit more complex, but the gist of the idea of using Microservices is as stated above.
Another benefit of Microservice Architecture (which is also the result of the loose coupling of components of your software and standardizing the way they communicate with each other) is the possibility to implement them in different programming languages, or using different technologies, which results in the system that is scalable and flexible.
Taking advantage of a new technology or programming language for implementing a new feature for your business is now possible with Microservices and even if you need to rewrite the whole application for the purpose of keeping it up to date with the new technologies, you can do it by changing the parts of the application one by one, without the user even noticing.
One of the powers of Microservices is the ability to scale horizontally, which simply means that you can duplicate your deployed services quite easily, which, in turn, combined with load-balancing and testing for real-life case-scenarios (and that is also made easier), can be a game changer when dealing with performance issues.
Independent components are easier to test and, naturally, well-tested components make more robust software, but also, it is only fair to say that testing of parts of the software doesn’t make the software tested as a whole.
And again, isolation of various parts of the application from each other makes it easier to monitor and solve some security issues, since security problem could happen in one section without affecting other areas of the project.
Yet another advantage of making components independent, that is, as self-containing as possible, is that you can reuse them internally or offer them to other businesses as a service, and if you choose, they can even be made into a paid service, for example, the example with payment module we mentioned before.
Microservices enable continuous delivery, which means your software can be modified and delivered to your client base frequently, easily, because of its automated nature and with a lower level of risk.
As it is quite hard to imagine a successful software product that doesn’t integrate one or more already existing services, this point deserves to be mentioned.
Separation of parts of your product makes it easier to implement integration components without affecting the rest of the software.
Easy integration and automatic deployment are possible using open-source continuous integration tools such as Jenkins.
It is worth mentioning that some real-life success examples of redesigning software into Microservices include names as big as Walmart, Netflix, Amazon and Spotify.
Not going in too many details of those stories, it will be enough to say that after remodelling its website into Microservices Architecture, Walmart successfully managed to solve the problem of downtime on Black Fridays, increased conversions by 20% overnight and mobile orders by 98%.
Amazon got rid of an enormous and painful task of taking a new version of the software and manually deploying it on the production environment, for which the company had a whole team of engineers in early 2000’s.
Using Microservices Architecture Spotify can serve 75 million active users and provide them with a flawless user experience.
So, if any of the problems mentioned above, connected to maintaining and updating relatively large or quickly-growing software made your heart jump because of painful recognition, you might want to consider giving a shot to Microservices.
If you aren’t sure whether it’s a good idea or not, you can always outsource or have a consultation with professionals.
In case you have any questions or general comments regarding the benefits of Microservice Architecture, which the article didn’t cover, please do not hesitate to contact us or leave a comment below.
