Modernizing applications in today’s world often involves moving to cloud-based applications built as microservices. And often, microservices development services to create necessary architecture use container technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes. Why? Because microservices architecture improves the scalability, speed of development, and iteration of services.
A microservices architecture divides an application into a series of independently deployed services that communicate through APIs. Thus, each individual service can be deployed and scaled independently. This approach allows for fast and frequent delivery of large, complex programs. Unlike a monolithic application, the microservices architecture will enable teams to implement new features and make changes faster without having to rewrite much of the existing code.
What Are The Challenges Facing Microservices?
Programs are evolving
Monolithic applications are designed as autonomous units. Very typically, code is organized in multiple layers to separate user interfaces from business rules and data. However, over time, business needs to change, develop and grow. And the more time passes, the more monolithic applications suffer from a legacy of obsolete features and high technical debt. Connections between business processes are getting stronger. This leads to more complex maintenance and difficulties in adding new features.
People change
Application development takes time and skilled people. The more complex the application, the more features it has, and the more we need an individual team, which specializes in quite specific solutions, such as the Digiteum team. And gradually, the more likely the development team will change. Even with perfect documentation, a thorough onboarding process, and a good atmosphere, it becomes increasingly difficult to onboard new team members because the program is too complex.
Technology is evolving faster than ever
Technologies are evolving. They may bring new features, better performance, better scalability, or may simply reduce development costs. It can be challenging to take advantage of new technologies in a monolithic application.
How Do Microservices Help Solve These Problems?
Improved maintainability and scalability
The microservices are small, independent, and loosely coupled services. Therefore, the complexity of the microservice is relatively small. Because a microservice is fully responsible for maintaining its own state and data, a small team can easily manage it. And of course, small independent services are easier to maintain or change.
Keep the team motivated
Microservices architecture allows applications to be developed with separate, small, and autonomous teams. Each team, such as the Digiteum team, is responsible for a business or technical area. This is an opportunity to give people clear goals and high responsibility on a controlled and, above all, controlled perimeter.
Be at the forefront of technology
Each service can run on different platforms, languages, or framework versions. And yet, these microservices can coexist and communicate. This allows you to use the technology that best suits each need and, above all, to be able to take advantage of updating versions of frameworks without affecting the existing one.
How Do Microservices Improve Load Management?
Whatever the type of architecture, we are not immune to the need to manage spikes in demand. With a microservices architecture, an application is divided into components that can run on different servers and/or different technology stacks. To handle spikes in demand, it will likely need to manage a set of microservices that need to be coordinated, rather than just one. Microservices will offer you better granularity because scalability can be managed at the microservices level itself. That way, you don’t have to rethink your entire application, just a set of microservices. At the same time, it is not necessary to pay for the bandwidth of the entire infrastructure, but only for the necessary services. In general, this means you have fewer restrictions, but still need to have a well-defined understanding of the microservices involved.
It is thanks to the use of serverless components in the architecture of microservices that we benefit from optimal scalability. Cloud providers have understood this very well, and the serverless services offered tend to offer automatic horizontal scaling solutions or are set up in a few clicks. When using this type of solution, you don’t have to worry about hosting servers, which eases the problem of scalability.
An Example Of Microservices Architecture
Let’s take the example of a hypothetical software project. The following points show an e-commerce site with a web application and a mobile application interacting with several microservices, each of which provides specific functionality for the domain.
Today’s web applications run in browsers and are often made available from a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN offers the advantage of distributing web applications to servers around the world so that they can be loaded quickly by web browsers. CDNs are also used to deliver multimedia content such as images, audio, and video. For example, in this system, images and videos of goods for sale are broadcast from a CDN.
Account Maintenance
Account Service provides customer account information such as address and payment information.
Inventory service
It provides up-to-date information on the stock of goods that can be purchased by the customer.
Shopping cart service
The customer uses it to select the items they want to purchase from the inventory.
Payment service
Customers pay for goods in the basket.
Delivery service
It plans the packaging and delivery of the purchased products.
Applications interact with microservices through some APIs published by each microservice. API Gateway allows applications to rely on APIs provided by microservices and microservices to exchange with other microservices with the same API.
Each microservice consists of a service and a database. Services manage the API, implement business logic, and store data in the database.
So is it easier to manage or implement a microservices architecture? Not necessarily. This gives much more flexibility at multiple levels but requires better governance, better service management, and a global view of the platform. And since cloud platforms (such as Microsoft Azure’s PaaS services) offer more and more microservices solutions, and if you are interested to take a quick look at these types of solutions, you need to find good microservices development services.
