Technologies work as one of the key enablers for businesses to radically enhance their software development and deployment process. One such technology, microservices, has been creating a lot of buzz ever since the term was coined in 2011. Many forward-thinking enterprises like Netflix, PayPal, eBay, Twitter, Etsy, and Amazon have embraced this modular approach for building applications. So the question is, what are these microservices that 85% of large organizations are using?
The traditional approach for application development creates more problems as apps become more extensive and complex. Unlike a few years ago, no enterprise today wants to have a consolidated, single application to manage their end-to-end business functions. Because often, applications become easier to develop and maintain when broken down into smaller pieces that work together. And that’s precisely the central idea behind microservices!
Read on to understand what microservices are, how they compare with a monolith and service-oriented architecture (SOA), their advantages and drawbacks, and many more valuable insights.
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What are microservices?
Microservice is an architectural style where an extensive software application is constructed as a suite of individual, loosely coupled services. In a microservices architecture, every service performs its dedicated business function and communicates with each other via well-defined web interfaces.
Many organizations have embraced Conway’s Law to leverage the power of distributed teams and create efficient microservice architecture. Given below are some common characteristics that most microservice architectures exhibit.
Characteristics of microservices
Each service has a separate database layer, independent codebase, and CI/CD tooling sets.
Services are responsible for preserving their data or external state.
Every service is independently deployable and can be tested in isolation without depending on other services.
Internal communication between the services happens via well-defined APIs or any lightweight communication protocol.
Misconceptions about microservices
“Micro” means small – A microservice is comparatively “small” than the enormous monoliths. However, making it too small would be a mistake. The size of microservices generally depends on the application.
Microservices entirely eliminate complexity – Microservices shift complexity from code design and implementation into system operations where we can automate things.
Microservice can “easily” scale systems – Yes, scaling is undoubtedly an advantage here, but it’s not as easy as it sounds. Upscaling can involve managing several services simultaneously, and you have to ensure that the upscaled components integrate with the rest of the system.
How do Microservices compare with monolithic and SOA?
Three popular architectures — monolithic, service-oriented architecture, and microservices are mostly used to build a new application. We’ve already discussed microservices earlier, now let’s understand the other two.
Monolithic architecture – A monolithic application is developed as a single unit, where all features, functionality, and modules are tightly coupled for development, integration, and deployment.
Microservices vs monolithic
Independent services communicate via APIs
Complex app encompasses several tightly-coupled functions
Difficult to achieve
Easy to achieve
Independently scalable
Challenging
High operational agility
Difficult to achieve operational agility
Service-oriented architecture – Created as a response to the traditional approach, SOA helps decouple an application into smaller modules. These separate service modules intercommunicate to meet particular business requirements.
Often, many developers consider microservices as a subtype of SOA, while others insist each solves a different set of problems.
Microservices vs SOA
What are the benefits of microservices?
Microservices sit well with both cloud and DevOps. Let’s see how. Most companies nowadays are migrating their workloads to the cloud. Microservices allow software development teams to use patterns like event-driven programming and autoscale scenarios. And this, in turn, nicely complements cloud-based application architectures.
The businesses also exhibit the same enthusiasm for adopting the DevOps strategy. DevOps practices also work by breaking large problems into smaller pieces and solving them one at a time. As a result, microservices perfectly fit into the DevOps ideals. We’ll discuss more regarding the relationship between microservices and DevOps later on.
Also, microservices provide independent scaling, easy deployment, technology stack flexibility, and faster time to market. Here are the 5 main benefits of microservices.
Real-world examples of microservices
Microservices can be beneficial for rapidly growing industries like an online marketplace, eCommerce, social media networks, finance, healthcare, etc. Some of the practical use cases for a microservice architecture include –
Let’s see some famous microservices examples. Thanks to these tech giants, the world realized how disruptive the transition from monolith to microservices could be!
Netflix – Modern cloud-based companies consider Netflix a role model for using microservice architecture. The streaming giant started setting up its microservice architecture on AWS in 2009. Within two years, Netflix migrated from a monolith into microservices in phases. First, they transitioned movie encoding and other non-customer-facing applications. Then they decoupled customer-facing elements such as movie selection, account sign-ups, device selection, and configuration.
Amazon – World’s largest online retailer used to run on an extensive monolithic application with many modular yet tightly-coupled components. As a result, Amazon could not split its teams into smaller groups and speed up its development cycle. Then, the company divided the code as independent functional services, wrapped with web services, and eventually progressed to microservices.
Best Buy – In 2010, Best Buy started transforming its eCommerce platform. Their mission was to break the monolithic, tightly coupled application into microservices for quick deployment of new features and react to market changes in the retail landscape.
Microservices are a nearly perfect solution to the modern software world’s need to deliver faster functionality and reliability. However, the transition from monolithic to microservices can be lengthy and tedious.