Recent years have been testimony to the omnipresence of mobile computing. This rise has required application developers to design applications that are lightweight and self-contained. That is not all. They are expected to deploy these applications quickly and make changes to the application without a complete redeployment. This has led to the development of microservices architecture.
Microservices were created to overcome the challenges and difficulties created by monolithic architecture. Monolithic architecture is like a large container holding all software components. Its challenges include a lack of agility, reliability, slow development, and more. Microservices were developed to bypass these challenges.
This blog aims to help you understand how microservices can take your business to new heights. We will also take a look at some of the real-world use cases of microservices to give you a more detailed understanding.
What Is Microservices Architecture?
Microservices architecture and microservices are used interchangeably. It is an architectural approach to application development, where an application is divided into a suite of small, independent units that are capable of functioning and communicating via APIs.
Though these are independent units, the application can pull any of these microservices to work together. Microservices can help achieve the scalability, simplicity, and flexibility needed to build highly sophisticated software applications.
Why Implement Microservices Architecture?
The microservices architecture makes application development quicker and more efficient. When agile deployment is married to the flexible application of different technologies, the duration of the development cycle reduces drastically. Here are a few reasons why businesses must implement a microservices architecture:
Data Processing Made Easy
Applications that run on microservices architecture can handle simultaneous requests. Simply put, large amounts of data can be processed in less time allowing quicker data processing and more efficient application performance.
Modernizing Legacy Application
Moving from legacy to modern platforms will enable businesses to be future-ready. To ensure a strong and modern infrastructure it is essential for all businesses to refactor it with microservices that allow them to deploy full-stack development technologies. This can lead to improvements in application performance with horizontal scalability.
Big Data Applications
Microservices coupled with Event-Driven Architecture provide scalability and extensibility to the required application.
Real-Time Data Processing
Microservices architecture has a publish-subscribe messaging pattern. This pattern enables seamless asynchronous communication to process and analyze data in real-time to generate intelligent outputs.
Multi-group Developments
Multiple developers will have to work on the same piece of application feature if they have to meet release deadlines on time. microservices architecture enables the splitting of an application into independent services. These independent services can then be managed and plugged in together by individual groups.
Improved DevOps
DevOps and microservices improve productivity when applied together. The common toolset used for both development and operations enables a common terminology and processes for project requirements, task dependencies, and challenges. This allows the teams to work together on a problem and successfully fix a build configuration or build script.
What benefits can microservices architecture bring to your business?
The benefits of microservices are many. These include independent scaling, easy deployment, technology stack flexibility, and faster time to market. Apart from these, here are seven top benefits of microservices:
1 Flexible approach
- The tech-agnostic approach allows businesses to select the stack that works best for each of the components. As a result, your business can avoid unnecessary tradeoffs.
2 Effective migration to newer technologies
- Microservices enable the ability to migrate to newer technologies quickly and easily. Instead of rewriting the code, your engineers can develop and support smaller parts and can effectively upgrade on demand.
3 Unparalleled scalability
- Unparalleled scalability and capacity to grow are the strongest advantages of microservices architecture. Autonomous services can be scaled individually without affecting other services and inflating the cost of scalability.
4 Improve agility
- With microservices, small teams can work independently reducing development cycle time and improving time-to-market. This allows businesses to allocate resources and time according to their current business goals and changing market needs. Instead of investing in full-scale development, businesses can keep a laser focus on critical modules and business functions, resulting in significant savings.
5 Improved automation and easier maintenance
- The microservices ecosystem is easier to maintain as it can be updated frequently and deployed independently of other services. The modern DevOps tools and practices allow adjusting this process to changing needs of each team. This automation makes application development effective and error-free.
6 Reliable and stable
- Because the services are reliable and stable, any error or security issues in one service will not affect the performance of another component.
7 Optimized development time and cost
- The flexible nature of microservices architecture allows leveraging a dedicated team model that can work in parallel. As a result, it boosts your productivity and delivery speed.
Top Example
Amazon simplified its pipeline, detected problem areas, and rebuilt a robust application framework. It did all that while introducing a solid open-source system to manage the huge volume of data processing. The microservices optimally supported every function across the globe.
eBay was overwhelmed with growing traffic and it was becoming increasingly difficult for the systems to handle the complexities of growth. By adopting microservices architecture, eBay decided to divide the application, database, and even search engines. Doing so stabilized its website while boosting its time-to-market rate.
Netflix is an over-the-top content platform. It has been an early adopter of microservices and has made an engrossing case study that focuses on various benefits of microservices. It takes over 500 microservices and APIs to deliver this refined product.
Twitter is a social media network that needs to capture large amounts of unstructured data. Hence, it needs to be scalable and at the same time flexible. Twitter moved to microservices architecture and that made it seamless to identify roadblocks and enable faster deployments.
How Can Fingent Help?
Mature startups and rapidly evolving product companies choose microservices for agility, faster time-to-market, and the ability to scale. Are you considering starting your microservices development project? Or leverage it to improve scalability and boost performance?
We at Fingent, have been working with multiple microservices-based systems. Currently, we are helping several clients to migrate from the monolith architecture. We can help you navigate through the advantages and disadvantages of microservices and work out a strategy for your business. we can take on an entire project and help you reach your delivery goals faster. Contact our tech specialists today and describe your project and needs.
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