Microservices architecture refers to a group of services that are highly testable and maintainable. In addition, these services can be deployed independently and organized around various business capabilities that their implementation in a business solves.
There are a number of advantages of using microservice architecture, but before we move on to them, we will provide our readers a little background of this architecture and what are the different components present in it. Today we will be diving deep to find how a microservice architecture can be of great help to your business and what you need to do in order to deploy it on your system.
What Are Microservices? [Definition]
First, we need to define what microservices are precise; well, for starters, these are an architectural approach for developing an application that will be used in companies and businesses. Being an architectural framework, these services which are presented in this group are loosely coupled with each other.
As a result, if one team decides to make a few changes in their service, the whole system will not break down and keep on working. Many companies are developing their applications using microservices due to their ability to create new components quickly when those services are changing or need to be revamped for future demands.
Given below, we have provided the list of things and processes that helps you define what applications are working as microservices and which ones are not.
First, in a microservice, a group of small teams and developers are enough to maintain the specific services and add in the changes when required.
Every service in the architecture has its own codebase, and it is both developed and managed by a small team of developers.
Services can be deployed independently on the business, or they can work loosely with each other. A service from the application can be rebuilt if it does require some change without making changes to the whole application.
Each service is on its own when it comes to persisting its own data. This is something different from the traditional model of developing services where the data layer gets to handle the data persistence.
The implementation details of each service are hidden from the other, and they communicate with each other using well-defined APIs.
Also, the services don’t have to work on the same technology or even a framework, libraries, and stack.
Difference Between Microservice Architecture And Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
The working of a microservices architecture may seem a little bit familiar to you if you have worked with SOA. This is because the core of these two architectures is pretty much the same, and both separate the apps according to their core functionality while avoiding the pitfall like monoliths.
For some developers, it is hard to find which architecture is best for them from these two but identifying the best option is undoubtedly necessary to see which implementation works best for your enterprise.. In the below section, we have provided a small comparison between the two to clear out the confusion that you might have.
Microservices
- The architecture of Microservices is designed to host services that can work on their own or independently.
- There is no component sharing involved in the microservices.
- The granularity of services is pretty fine.
- Every single service which is present in the group can support its own data storage.
- It requires different teams that are handling the service to collaborate with each other.
- The microservices are great for small-scale web-based applications.
- There is no communication layer, and all the communication takes place from the API layer.
- The remote services used by this architecture are REST and JMS.
- The deployment is pretty fast and easy to process.
SOA
- The core concept of this architecture is to share the resources that are provided to the application among various services.
- The SOA does involve constant sharing of the components in between the services.
- The services are much more prominent in comparison and are more modular in nature.
- The data storage has to be shared between the services.
- There is a common governance protocol that works all across the teams and services.
- SOA is better suited for large-scale integrations.
- The communication between the services takes place via ESB.
- The remote service protocols used in SOA are SOAP and AMQP.
- The deployment of SOA is not that flexible, and it does take some time for all the services to start working in harmony.
Advantages Of Using Microservices
If you have worked with microservices, you know that it is quite famous among developers and executives, and project leaders. For the most part, we don’t expect team leaders and executives to have an interest in the architecture of the application as that enthusiasm can only be seen in development teams that are actually working on the architecture and finding out its benefits.
The main reason for such a deep interest in microservices is that their work reflects how the business leaders want the structure of the application to look, feel, and run to their customers. Given below, we have pointed out some of the benefits that a company enjoys when they start implementing microservices architecture in their development.
Independent Deployability
One of the essential aspects of microservices is the smaller and independent deployability. As a result, it doesn’t require a considerable team to change the line of code or make changes in other services to work with the new code. With the help of microservices, the companies finally get freedom from the small changes that would have taken more time. Microservices aren’t just able to increase the speed of program development, they will also improve the quality of it. Today, there are more and more cross-functional teams working together on other businesses’ services, allowing them to work in an agile way on these services.
With the independent deployability now, one can quickly isolate the faulty service, causing the application not to work correctly. The small services now come with clear boundaries and communication patterns that make it easier for the team members to find out about the code of each service individually and contribute to its changes if needed.
Better Tools For The Job
In SOA, there is a common stack that is shared among many services that are present in the application. It is a significant drawback since some of the services are more efficient when they utilize separate tools. In the end, it causes the architecture to become even more complex due to the faults it causes. In contrast to this implementation, the components used in services are deployed independently, and they communicate with each other via REST and some event streaming message brokers.
There is no doubt that technology keeps on changing, and to be one step ahead of the competitor, a company needs to be the early adapter. As a result of the microservice implementation, it is much easier for companies and developers to embed new changes and to evolve their applications with the much more desirable technology that has the potential to provide better support to the application in the near future.
Precise Scaling
As we said earlier, each service can be deployed independently. In the same way, each microservice can be scaled up when needed without causing a disturbance in the working of other services present in the application. Thus, if the implementation of microservice architecture is done precisely, it will require you to spend less time on the infrastructure of the application.
The Pillars Of Microservices Architecture
As a developer, you might think there isn’t a specific term or definition of microservices. Well, that’s true; there is no single standard model which can represent this architecture style. But each microservice architecture is undoubtedly going to share some of these six components or characteristics that we have written below.
1. Multiple Components
One of the first things you will notice when you come across a microservice architecture is that it can be easily broken down into individual services? But what is the reason behind these many services being coupled together? The simple answer lies in the deployment, which allows the services to be deployed, tweaked, updated, scaled up independently without causing trouble to other services presented in the group.
This leads to one of the very few problems that a development team must face, which is the expensive remote calls instead of using the in-process calls, which can lead to increased complexity when allocating responsibilities among the different components.
2. Simple Routing
If we look at the working of Microservices, we can see that it works quite like a UNIX system, in which the service or the application gets to receive the request, process it, and then generate the output accordingly. This also suggests that microservices do have smart endpoints which process the info and apply logic. Along with this, the services use dumb pipes that actually help in the flow of information in the application resulting in easy-to-understand routing.
3. Decentralized
There are so many technologies that are working together in the microservices that it is hard for centralized governance to function optimally. As a result, this architecture gets decentralized governance. Also, this allows developers to create tools specific to the service, which can be used by other services to solve their issues. Moreover, the architecture also works excellent with decentralized data management. This makes it possible for each service in the application to handle its own database individually.
In this type of architecture, two things are decentralized, the first one being governance, and the second is data management. When working with microservices, you will get to know that overheads are just simply unattractive. Decentralized governance is necessary when there are a number of services present in the application, and each of them is handled by a different team. Netflix is a great example that follows this type of governance, it allows developers to find a different approach if required, and if they are unable to find it, there’s always a battle-tested way to get things back to working.
On the other hand, microservices also allow each service to have its own database or even a shared database system, but it needs to have different instances. The microservices architecture follows one of the well-known approaches, which is Polyglot persistence; this data management approach can also be seen in the monolith architecture as well, but it is more frequent in microservices.
4. Built For Business
When developing microservices, you first look at the requirements of your business and then inherit the solutions in these services. Also, in the older approach, each team has a specific focus such as UIs, databases, technology layers, etc. In the case of microservice architecture, the implementation of teams is cross-functional. As a result, each team will be responsible for developing a particular service that can communicate with other services via message bus. Thus, if you have to build a service, you are going to run it as well.
5. Failure Resistant
One of the consequences that one has to face when using microservices as components is that when you are designing the application, you need to develop them in such a way that they can tolerate any failure of service. Any of the services in microservice architecture could fail due to the unavailability of resources from the supplier end. But in this case, the client already needs to be one step ahead and must address the issue gracefully.
On the other hand, there is additional complexity in the monolithic version of the architecture to handle the failures. Enterprises like Netflix, Amazon, and eBay have a team of engineers and developers that are constantly testing out their services for failure along with their data centers during the working day. This way, they are monitoring the resilience of the application.
Microservices architecture puts a lot of importance on keeping track of failures in real-time and checking both the architectural elements and the business metrics which are present in the application. This leads to each team having sophisticated monitoring and logging setups for their individual service.
Evolutionary Microservice Is A Part Of New Evolution In Application Development
There is no doubt that microservice architecture will be evolutionary in terms of design. The developers that work with this application architecture always think about the decomposition of a tool as an opportunity to find something which can be used in the decomposed tool’s place and fasten up the process.
Whenever you are thinking about breaking up the application into smaller components, you are faced with the challenges such as how to slice up the application? What are the principles that are going to decide the grouping of components and services? But when you put up service along with components of the application, it will result in more granular release planning. As a result, in the future, if you ever want to redeploy the specific service, you don’t need to add the update to the whole application.
Wrapping Up
So this is what you call a microservices architecture, it may sound a bit technical, but in truth, it is nothing but a way to develop an application. So if you want to use microservices architecture, you need to have a bit of cautious optimism, as it is undoubtedly a worthwhile road on which you wish to tread. But you need to be careful as a tiny wrong step can cause you troubles during the development phase. But that’s the beauty of software development. You can always decide on the imperfect information you currently have about the project and start working on it.