Why Microservices Architecture?

What is Microservices Architecture? Why Microservices Architecture? With the increase in size and complexity of the applications, the traditional way of building applications via a monolithic architecture approach has become overly problematic due to its principle of creating a single, indivisible, and dependent unit. Some of the problems it can cause include huge code base handling, adopting new technology, scaling, deploying, or implementing changes because it is a single and indivisible unit.

On the contrary, microservices that have just come to light a few years ago are trending these days. The reason behind its popularity indeed includes several benefits such as higher scalability, flexibility, agility, and so on. Some of the tech giants like Amazon, Google, Netflix have also successfully switched to microservice architecture. That’s why many software development companies and developers are eventually moving towards the microservices architecture for software development.

To understand the concept of microservices architecture in a better way, let’s take a closer look at what actually is microservices architecture and “why” should development teams use this approach for their project.

What’s Microservices Architecture?

Microservices architecture is an approach of breaking huge software projects into loosely coupled and independently deployable modules that can easily interact with each other through Application Programming Interfaces or APIs. It centers on the reliability, resilience, and availability of the application by adapting to the redundancy of server instances and data duplication. Moreover, every functionality of the application is built as a service that is containerized and hosted on a discrete server instance which makes it easier to build, scale and expand the app according to the requirements. Microservices also help in easy code updates, better scalability of independent services to reduce the cost associated with the development and deployment of the application.

Read: "SOA vs. Microservices: What's the Difference?"

“While several different architectures and models are available for the developer, why should microservices architecture be used?” - you may ask. To answer this question, let’s move ahead and understand the “why” of microservices.

Why Microservices Architecture?

Microservices give your teams and systems a lift through distributed development. You can also develop multiple microservices concurrently. Simply put, it means more developers working on the same app, at the same time, which results in a shorter time spent in development.

• Continuous Delivery and Deployment

Continuous Delivery/ Deployment is an important part of DevOps. It is a set of practices for the rapid, reliable, and frequent delivery of the software. A high-performing DevOps team typically deploys changes into production with almost zero production issues. Microservices enables a developer to continuously deliver and deploy large and complex applications in three ways:

1. It provides the automated testability needed for continuous delivery and deployment. That is, having smaller services, the microservice architecture enables automated tests that are much easier to write and execute which results in few bugs.

2. Each service in this architecture can be deployed independently of the other services. So the developers working on service do not need to coordinate with other developers and the changes can be deployed easily and frequently into production.

3. With microservices, each team of developers is solely responsible for the development and deployment of certain related services that allow development, deployment and scaling of their services independently that in return increases the development velocity.

Read: "Monolithic vs Microservice Architecture"

• Small Service & Easy Maintenance

As each service in the microservices architecture is relatively smaller, the developers can easily understand the code. This small codebase doesn’t slow down the IDE which makes developers highly productive as well. Moreover, if there is a problem with the code, it can be easily identified and maintained. Each of these services also starts a lot faster than any monolithic architecture does. All of this makes a developer more productive while speeding up the deployments.

Read: "Advantages of Using Docker for Microservices"

• Independent Scalability

Each service in a microservice architecture can be scaled independently using x-axis and z-axis scaling. Here x-axis scaling refers to running multiple copies of the containerized application and z-axis consists of running multiple, identical copies of the code or subset of data and are used to scale databases across the set of servers. Besides, each service can be deployed on the best-suited hardware according to the resource requirements. It is quite different from using a monolithic application which requires extremely different resources.

• Easier Adoption of New Technologies

Microservice architecture removes any commitment to the technology stack (a list of services used to build and run an application). Apart from that, the developers here are free to choose the language and framework that are best suited for the service they are about to handle. As the services in a microservice architecture are small, the development team can try using better languages and technologies for rewriting its code. If their trial fails, that rewritten code can be removed without having to worry about the risk of the entire software being attacked by bugs. It is a bit different from monolithic architecture as the initial choice of technology severely restricts the ability to use different frameworks or languages in the future.

• Fault Isolation

Microservices offer better fault isolation than monolithic architecture-based applications. Let’s say, if there is a memory leak in one service then it will only affect that service while other services will continue to handle the upcoming requests usually. While in a monolithic application even one misbehaving component can bring down the complete system.

Read: "Microservices vs Web Services"

Final Thoughts

Microservices architecture’s biggest strength is developing a small and focused team to develop independent functions to improve productivity and deployment of the project. Moreover, it works with different development methodologies to enhance processes. Now that you have a better understanding of the “why” of microservices architecture, it will be easier for you to choose the architecture that you want to use for your next project. If you are a business owner who wants to develop a huge application that will have multiple services, you can easily consult with our expert professionals or hire developers who are experienced and efficient in microservice application development.