Microservices – The Robust Architecture for Applications
Growing customer demands have increased the need to build large scale and complex applications meeting the requirements of end users. Microservices have changed the way traditional and legacy applications were built. Unlike the monolithic architectural style, microservices architecture helps to bring business agility and improves time to market.
Microservices architecture splits the single application into a set of services, each running on its own but communicating with each other through APIs.
Microservices architecture is business-oriented, adaptable, and loosely coupled. Loose coupling promotes greater reusability and easier maintainability.
Building a Robust Microservices Architecture – Best Practices
- Develop service templates – Services do a lot more than just fulfilling business logic, such as client-side load balancing, monitoring, and much more. Developing service templates for general tasks can save a lot of time. Moreover, standardizing communication method between services is vital with growing number of services.
- Loosely coupled – Services should be developed and deployed independently and each service should have its separate private data. It is preferable to have a clear utilization documentation of each service and it should be placed at a common place.
- Development Environments – With various smaller services to be managed, make certain that development environments are filled with virtual machines. This helps in saving time for development teams.
- Quick Code Integration – Ensure that the code integration to the main branch is done shortly after the changes are made to the code. Updates in the main branch should activate automated builds and tests to verify the build quality. If all the tests pass, continuous integration system should ship the release to deployment.
- Provision for failures – With multiple small sets of services running constantly, it is difficult to find a failure if multiple services fail. Apply centralized monitoring tools to easily identify whether the failure is encountered across services or in the instance of a particular service. Monitor things like memory usage, network operations, and request latency.
Software teams do not just want to leverage technology, but also go to market faster with minimum iterations. With conventional monolithic architecture, this is difficult to achieve, as it is time consuming and challenging to maintain.
Microservices architecture has settled this problem and makes it possible to build loosely coupled services that could be scaled, changed, and easily managed.
Moreover, microservices enable DevOps and help companies to focus on zero-downtime, continuous integration, and deployment. With so many benefits, microservices are here to stay for a long time.
Benefits of Microservices
- Separate Components
- The Primary benefit of the microservices architecture is its loosely coupled components. These components can easily be developed, replaced, and scaled separately.
- Increased Resilience
- As complex applications are broken into distinct service components and deployed on multiple servers, the defect of one of the services will not impact the entire application. Microservices improve fault isolation.
- Compatible with Distributed Environment
- Understanding how an application is developed is crucial when there is a transition in development teams. In a distributed development environment where some of the team members are geographically dispersed, microservices architecture make it easier for development teams to understand the entire functionality of a service as it is not built into one single package.
- Re-usability of services
- Microservices are organized around business capabilities instead of a specific project or product requirement. This allows technology teams to reuse services and reduce costs.
- Easy to Deploy
- Technology teams usually have to deploy an entire application again because of small change in the code. However, microservices makes it easy to deploy. The extent of deployment is less, and the service that has an issue needs to be handled. With more and more companies now resorting to iterative development, it is essential to have an underlying architecture which is scalable, robust, and adaptable to real-time business needs.
