The hype of microservices is real. According to a survey of 1502 software engineers, systems, and technical architects, 61% said that their organization has been using microservices for the past year. But what exactly makes microservices ideal for developing applications? Of course, it offers the flexibility of developing individual services simultaneously that reduces the turnaround time of application deployment and delivery. But the road to such an ideal SDLC is filled with challenges. Trendyol, a Turkey-based e-commerce company, struggled to implement a microservices architectural style for years. Their experienced developers recount how issues like data ownership, communication patterns, improper project planning, and monitoring led to an implementation failure.
There are countless examples of failed microservices implementation – not because the developers did not understand the concept and its functionality, but because its implementation was unsound. Microservices design principles allow developers to make critical design decisions about their architecture, the frameworks, and the tools they can utilize to navigate the vast technology landscape. Let’s look at a few of the technical and business benefits that microservices offer as their features.
Service distribution based business capability
In monolithic architecture, the technical boundaries decide the overall architecture. However, this is not true in the case of microservices architecture. Microservices discourage such models. Business functionalities should be the deciding judge of your overall architecture. Teams are formed based on individual expertise in a particular business function in a microservices architecture.
For example, an application built on microservices architecture can have its login page designed by a group of developers, whereas the payment page service of the same application is built by a different group of specialized developers.
Decentralized data management
Microservices embrace the concept of decentralized data management. Unlike monolithic architecture, there won’t be a single database for the whole application. Instead, every service owns the data specific to that business service. Implementing this isolates the impact due to schema changes. This approach is known as Polyglot Persistence. Decentralizing data across microservices makes it easier to manage updates.
Build it, Run it
Microservices embrace the DevOps concept. That means microservices rely on the team that develops a certain service to operate and maintain the code in production. This is completely different from how traditional IT infrastructure used to work. Earlier developers were only concerned about developing a certain feature and committing their code to the central repository. The responsibility of deployment and making updates were those of other teams. This introduces a second layer of the process that makes deploying changes slower.
Following the DevOps principle eliminates the extra process layer by shouldering the responsibility of deployment and running a service on the team developing it.
Polyglot
One of the major reasons to use microservices for application development is their flexibility in terms of the use of technology. In microservices, each service has its own ecosystem. The communication between other services happens through standard channels. It has nothing to do with the technological stack of each service. Depending on the situation at hand, Polyglot allows developers to choose many technological stacks or database solutions they deem fit to deal with the problem at hand.
Black box
Every microservice is defined as a black box in itself. The exact details of their complexity stay hidden from the other services. The only mode of communication between them is via well-defined APIs. This mitigates the possibility of dependency sharing or proliferation of dependencies between microservices.
Conclusion
Building an application in today’s era demands a lot of precalculations and consideration to account. Flexibility, scalability, maintenance, and support are as crucial as developing an application with world-class features. Using microservices, developers can sigh in peace as its advanced features take care of the complexity related to app development. Let me know if I missed any of the important features!
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