Microservices has now become an interesting concept of modern day application development. With this approach you can easily form modules for the application. Something you need to know is that you cannot go for Microservices for all kind of application development. You need to understand how one of such application interconnects and interacts with other services. This clearly means that if you wish to build your whole application based on bringing together individual Microservices, you need to check out your options before you plan to drop down the approach of monolithic application development.
Again, you will be bound to spend money when you plan to go for microservices and spending them before a proper thought is not advisable. If you wish to go ahead with it you can hire microservices architecture developers at low cost to make some savings.
What are Microservices?
Microservices is a kind of system where large and complex software solutions were built through a number of smaller microservices. Such microservices are independently deployable, loosely coupled, narrowly focused and working on fulfilling a business service. Such kind of microservices is capable to communicate with each other by making use of language-agnostic APIs just as REST. These microservices are actually individual applications which were built by small teams. Here the team of developers who worked on to build microservices is also responsible in offering support.
Why Microservices?
The current monolithic applications is said to be facing a number of challenges. Some of them like difficulty in development and code maintenance, difficulty to test and taking time in adaptation.
The issues with monolithic applications have been handled by new solutions like cloud computing and microservices. They have the right thing to offer business people in the form of scalability, security and improved reliability. Microservices being smaller individual units are easy to be managed and come with capabilities which can be developed and tested easily. They are faster to adapt too.
Characteristics of Microservices
Multiple components
The microservices application can be broken down further into different components. This makes it easy to work on them when needed. You can tweak, deploy or even redeploy the components individually without affecting the application as one. This clearly means that you don’t have to redeploy the whole application when you need to make a change in a service as it can be done individually. Now this comes at a cost. You will need remote calls, high level complexity when distributing responsibilities and coarser-grained remote APIs which can turn out to be expensive.
Built for Business
Microservices is more focused on business capabilities and its priorities. In case of monolithic development, teams are formed focusing on a specific aspect like databases, UIs, server-side logic while in case of microservices teams are formed based on cross-functional capabilities. So here each team will be responsible for building a product which will be capable to communicate using message bus. Here the team which builds the individual application is responsible for it throughout its life.
Simple Routing
Microservices work the way in which requests are received, processed and responses are generated accordingly. This is something very opposite to how enterprise service buses work. Microservices processes information through the endpoints and applies logic to it.
Decentralized
In case of microservices old methods of having a centralized option for governance does not work as it makes use of different platforms and technologies. The community of microservices has good number of developers who work on to develop useful tools which can be used by others to solve the issues and so decentralized governance work for it. Apart from decentralized governance, data management in decentralized form is also favoured by microservices architecture. Here each service comes with its own unique database while there is a single logical database for monolithic architecture.
Failure Resistant
Microservices architecture is well built to cope up with failures. Here different kinds of services are working together and communicating with each other and so chances are there that a service could fail. It can happen for a number of reasons. Here all the other services will be allowed to work while the non-functioning service is removed. Keeping an eye on microservices can help you prevent any service failure. This thing itself makes microservices complex compared to the normal monolithic architecture.
Evolutionary
It is said that microservices has an evolutionary design and it is made use into evolutionary systems where it is not possible to say which devices will be used to access the said application. In the beginning an application is developed in the monolithic architecture form but later when new requirements pop-up it is then turned into microservices which can then connect with monolithic architecture through APIs.
Benefits of Microservices
Here is a list of compiled benefits of microservices architecture.
Building and maintaining apps is easier
Simplicity is the key principle of microservices. When an application is divided into smaller parts it becomes easy to build and maintain it. Here each smaller section has its set of code and so code management is not troublesome. Services can be developed and implemented by using different software environments, databases and programming languages. This means each service can be managed independently as well as deployed, re-built and re-deployed separately. This means that any issue with the microservices will not have problem on the complete system and so if anything goes wrong with one of the service, it can be checked and repaired quickly. This also means that individual microservices can be put to work individually. In short Microservices architecture development services for businesses to build enterprise level applications will definitely prove to be beneficial.
Comes with business capabilities
With microservices architecture it is all about building functionality. Instead of sticking to technologies, here teams are more organized around building business capabilities. This means that the service developed by the team can be used for different usages. Again depending on the need, the same service can be used more than one time in a business process or can be used across different business channels. Here cross-functional team is formed to work on microservices and so each team member is responsible for the service he or she is involved in.
Improved productivity and speed
The issues of speed and productivity in the application are taken care by microservices architecture as it splits up the application into smaller manageable services. This speeds up the development process. This means different teams can start working on the services simultaneously before having to wait for the previous teams to get the work done. Like the development it is possible to speed up the quality testing quickly too as each service can be tested individually at the same time. So by the time some developers are working on developing some components, others that are developed can be tested quickly and deployed.
Flexibility and scalability
It is now known to you that each service in microservices architecture can be developed by using different technologies. This way it becomes possible to choose the right technology that best fits the service needs. Decoupled services can be written in different languages which will make sure that they will stay with other fragments peacefully. If you have plans to scale the application in the future, it can come in handy. You can add in new services or separate out the services from the application based on the scalability needs easily.
Autonomous and cross-functional teams
For distributed and remotely working teams microservices can come as a blessing. In case of monolithic architecture things can get dirty and messy if the teams are scattered at different locations. In case of microservices the developers get the freedom to work independently and on their own in smaller groups. So if you are planning to build an application or solution which is expected to turn big, opting for microservices is advisable.
The Future of Microservices
It is not sure whether microservices architecture will be followed as a preferred style for designing and developing applications by developers but it is very clear that this form of development offers some serious benefits. Many developers have been following the practice of SOA without having any proper name just to use APIs which you can call as microservices.
There are technologies which have were seen trying to addresses the communication and implementation issues that are getting resolved by microservices. Describing operations at the endpoint and finding it through WSDLs is done well by SOAP. The features of the service can be well explained with the help of UDDI. But the issues with these technologies are that they come with complex implementation and so new projects are not taken up using it. The services which are REST-based face the same kind of issues but you can use REST with WSDLs.
Sharing schema between unrelated applications has been seen as one of the main issues and this is has been resolved with microservices as well as different SOA systems. Some of the technologies like RIF, OWL and RDFS have been standardized but are not used frequently. Large private enterprises have not even adopted Schema.org and JSON-LD which is about open web which shares definitions.
Standardized and shared definitions are slowly making its way through government organizations. Once standardized definitions are agreed upon large scale then the next focus will be on small services which are based on microservices and are built to achieve certain goals. So when you build up an overall picture with the presence of Internet of Things, wearables and increasing complexity and communication requirements including SaaS apps you will find that there is a bright future of microservices architecture.
Related: The Future of Microservices
Getting Started with Microservices
A good number of businesses have already started to work on microservices. For the businesses which are yet to make use of microservices in their business, the first and the foremost thing to do is to think and anticipate the outcome. If you are not clear about what you expect to gain in the end then it will be all about introducing a new technology which will not add any value to the business.
Once there is a clear goal, the IT department will be able to divide the processes at the ground level. This will then help to develop microservices for the workflows and processes.
Once done that the next thing to do is deploy the platform that offers support to microservices architecture. If the platform is not deployed it will become tough to reuse them. Such kind of platform will make it possible to easily link microservices as well as remove them when the business requirements change. You can streamline the management of microservices using it.
It will become important to explain the use of microservices at the business level to the business owners, CEO and CFO so that enough resources will be allotted to speed up the development and deployment. The CIO will be responsible to explain how the industry is changing and what will be the effects on the company if it remains unchanged.
Conclusion
In today’s changing and highly-competitive business environment it becomes important for the businesses to stand out of the crowd and offer unmatched customer experiences. The best way to achieve it is by adapting their businesses with microservices. In the coming years more businesses will be seen understanding the benefits of microservices and utilizing it for changing and reshaping the business.
