Guide to Microservice Architecture for App Development

As business has become more competitive, we are bound to integrate trending technologies that help us stay intact in the business battlefield. Microservices aka Microservice architecture is one such technology technique that scales up your business process and keeps you profitable in the long run.

Technology offers a robust solution to organizations, start-ups, enterprises to grow market share and stay unaffected from the new entrants or established competitors. When there are new business players in the market, it affects the business as a whole and as a result, it increases competitions. Eventually, technology is not stable, and the need for an updated system is the need of every-day-business. As an organization, you would want to match the speed of your competitor, aren't you?

That's When You Need Innovative Technology Technique -Microservice Architectures

Today's customers are tech-savvy, and they give pretty importance to time and fast services. In such circumstances, if you fail to deliver the desired services, you will be left behind. Microservices architectures provide speed, agility, and innovation to your business applications. The technology technique is the most elegant way to deliver the best customer experience online. Moreover, if you are in customer-enteric business, it will be an opportunity to eliminate all the business challenges you are facing.

So, What is Microservices Architecture?

A business application has to be robust, scalable, durable, bearable and provide smooth services at all cost. The monolithic architecture is good enough for small and lightweight applications while it is not effective when it has to carry out multiple services together, require more database storage and much more. That's where Microservices architectures come into play. It enables developers to build application dividing it into numerous small programs for each feature and services separately. 

According to Martin Fowler, "A microservice architectural style is an approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms, often an HTTP resource API. These services are built around business capabilities and independently deploy-able by fully automated deployment machinery. There is a bare minimum of centralized management of these services, which may be written in different programming languages and use different data storage technologies."

Popularity of Microservice Architectures

A survey conducted by a private firm says that Microservice architectures are the increasing trend and application vendor choose it for new and even existing applications. Besides, clients also prefer different run-time platform and frameworks for microservices. Here are some of the exciting facts of Microservices.

The survey conducted by Red Hat found out how customers are using microservices and what number customer prefers to use the technique for new projects or looking to upgrade to microservices from the legacy system.

69% (Sixty Nine percent) of clients prefer microservices technique for both new projects and existing applications. Source : Redhat

Benefits of Microservices Architecture?

Even though there are many industry-standard applications architecture patterns, Monolithic and microservices are the two most adopted techniques today. The two main techniques have their own benefits, and they are utilized based on the business need. For example, Microservice architectures are used when an application tends to bear heavy traffic. Tops companies including Netflix, eBay, Amazon, Twitter, PayPal among many others have evolved through monolithic to microservices. The benefits of Microservice architecture are the following;

1. Continuous Integration/Deployment

Continuous integration and deployment become extremely easy when you adopt microservice architectures. For example, developers can add new futures or services creating a new container that too without affecting the existing containers. Similarly, deployment is also easy and independent.

2. Agility

At times, developers, as well as technology vendors, look for agile solutions which can be achieved through microservices. Development becomes fast, and investors can easily implement newly added features into the business process. Monolithic pattern limits itself to a certain level. 

3. Improved Scalability

Microservice architecture gives freedom to developers to scale through the application as per the need. All a developer has to do is to develop or create a new container, adding new service and more. It does not affect your business, if a specific section stops functioning. Each microservice is independently developed and maintained that gives your team freedom to change quickly.

4. Faster Time-to-Market

The primary purpose of the application is to market (your products and services). When microservices offers faster services that help users to connect you quickly and enjoy the flawless services. 

5. Higher Developer Productivity

Monolithic is the most complex development pattern while microservices offer easy and fast solutions. Developers find it easy to build and code while testing and debugging is extremely developer friendly.

6. Easier Debugging & Maintenance

Small containers require less time test and debug while maintaining the application turn simple and cost to develop an app reduces drastically. When there is a set of small containers, it becomes easy to find the fault and cure it without affecting the other containers in the collection.

7. Cost Effective

Developing complex application does not only vanishes your efforts and kill productivity but also make projects costly. Microservice architecture, on the other hand, provides overall relax to developers and investors. Developers get access to code, test and debug the applications while investors don't get robbed of pocket due to natural hosting features.

When to use Microservices?

When it comes to using microservices, you can either upgrade the existing application using the architectures or you can start a new project using the technique (microservice architectures). However, when your app needs the bulk of features and services with more database storage, then the monolithic architectures slowdown the service and the start time gets slow. Microservices provide agile and scalable services for all.  

Here are some circumstances when you can choose a microservice service.

• Development of an application from scratch
• Rebuilding (or refactoring) a legacy application
• Adding new functionality to an existing application

45% (Forty-Five percent) clients want "right tool for right stack" while 87% of clients using and considering implying multiple technologies for microservices.

Can I use a Microservice Approach for Mobile Development?

If you want to read the answer first, then it's 'yes.' You can use microservices architectures, but if you want to hear some analysis why then you need to read on to know. To understand the microservices, you need to be aware of the fundamental differences between the two main app development pattern -monolith and microservices.

Monolith Architecture

Monolith is the unified design to develop an application where a single container with all services executes actions. The components of the applications are interconnected and interdependent. It is suitable for a small application, but it creates a problem when there is substantial customer engagement. 

Microservice Architectures

In this pattern, an application is built using a modular approach for designing software solutions. Using these architectures, developers create a small set of independent components which run interdependently, and that in result provides fast services. You can also easily hire app developers from an IT development company and utilize their expertise and experience.

Now, I am sure that you can confidently decide whether you should proceed monolith or microservices way.

Things to Consider Before You Go for Microservices

Even if it is microservices, you need to think over plenty of stuffs before you move. Let's take a look here.

1. Level of Independence

You need to ensure that how independent you want your features and services to be. There are three ways you can make a level of independence. Such as;

(a) Extreme Microservice Architectures

Extreme Microservices Architectures stands when each service has its own UI and Database. The functions are completely decoupled and have nothing to do with each other in the group.

(b) Semi Microservice Architectures

In terms of semi microservice architectures, some components are shared between the Database. In this scenario, the services are not entirely decoupled, and changes can affect other services too.

(c) Normal Microservice Architectures

Normal Microservices Architectures are when main services are decoupled while all the branch services are tightly coupled together.

2. Code Organization

Though there are several ways you have to keep your codes organized, creating a repository or creating a single 'mono repo' for all services can make things in order. At the same time, if you have folders for each service.

3. Right Technology for Right Microservice

As we have already shown the survey that 45 percent of people want the right tool for the right service. So, you need to ensure that you have selected the tools that you are supposed to use with certain services.

Besides, there are some other things such as

• Operational complexities
• Continuous delivery
• Team organizations
• Right strategy

Among others that you need to ensure before you get to go with the microservice architectures.

The Disadvantage of Microservices Architecture

While microservice architectures provide plenty of benefits, it has some drawbacks as well. Remember, no matter how fruitful a technology or technique is, it cannot be ideal for every organization. Similarly, microservices have some drawbacks you need to know if you are interested in implementing the technique. Check out some of the complexities you might face while applying the architectures.

1. Complexities

One hand, microservices eliminate, and it doubles up to the other side. For example, as it involves many services, it has many services functioning independently, and hence they increase complexities to maintain. It requires lots of efforts to execute inter-service communication, monitoring, testing, and deployment.

2. Expensive

Microservice architectures are costly as it has multiple services and each service needs to communicate with each other. The number of services it will have a high number of remote calls it will have. The number of remote calls will increase network latency, and that will increase cost. 

3. Security

When there is inter-service communication, it increases security concern and may help intruders and gain access over the network.

Apart from these primary disadvantages, there are some common issues with microservice architectures. For example;

• High memory use
• A complex managing large number of deployment
• Issues with load balancing and network latency  

How to Apply Microservices Architecture to Android and iOS

Before you move the microservices, you need to take some practical analysis internally. For example;

• Take a look at the existing infrastructure
• Ensure that your team is ready to adopt the technique
• Cross inquiry with data admin whether they are aware of microservices

Now, begin with the platform instead of going all over implementing shifting from monolithic to microservices. Here's how you can start with;

• Create base architectures such as services, virtual machines templates, and containers
• Add API gateways
• Monitoring system
• Automation

More than that, there will be lots of things that you will be encountered with. So, make your team ready the make the changes.  

Is Microservice Architecture Future of Application Development

According to the post on DZone, microservice architecture is the growing trend, and it will continue to evolve throughout 2019. The reason behind its evolvement lies beneath the speed and scalability of the application. At the same time, it will help the investor to successfully implement mission-critical task while focusing on specific concern that too without affecting the entire architectures. Even web & mobile app development companies are also hiring more developers having skills and experience in microservices and other relevant development technique.

Conclusion

Throughout this article, we have explored all potentials of microservices architectures, and you need to take a final call after going through all the pros and cons of it. Shifting to microservices from the legacy system is one way a challenge that you are going to accept. However, if you are ready with all resources including your team and admin, then it's good to go options. Microservices have changed, and it has benefited a large number of tech vendors who are done up with database storage and concerned about speed. Hope you will get the perfect solutions after implementing the techniques.

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