Are you looking to take your business to the next level?
If so, microservices architecture can help. But, what are microservices? And how exactly can they help your business?
Check out this guide to learn about the top benefits of microservices architectures.
First things first, what exactly are microservices?
Microservices, also known as microservices architecture, is a method for designing and building applications. It factors an application into independent services that each perform one function but work together to provide the application’s full functionality.
This way, one team’s changes can’t break the entire application. With microservices, development teams are able to rapidly build new app components and meet the changing needs of businesses.
Microservices architecture sets itself apart from the traditional monolithic approach to building apps in the way it breaks apps down into their core functions.
Each function is known as a service, and each service can be deployed and built independently. This means that individual services can both function and fail independently without negatively affecting one another.
Each smaller, individual service that you divide your system into is robust, flexible, and complete. Each service runs as an autonomous process and is capable of communicating with other services through APIs.
You can also implement each microservice in a different language on a different platform. Each infrastructure can run in a container, and these containers can operate in parallel. This makes the existing infrastructure easier to maintain.
Monolithic architecture, in contrast, means that the different components of the code are designed to work together as one cohesive unit with shared memory space. This type of software is self-contained, meaning that the units are interdependent and interconnected.
If developers want to make any changes to a monolithic system, they need to build and deploy a whole stack at once. The same goes for scalability. The entire system, not just the individual modules, need to be scaled together.
Monolithic architecture makes it difficult to adopt a new technology stack. And, if you want to use a new framework or platform, you need to rewrite the entire solution, which can be cumbersome and time-consuming.
So, what are the main benefits of microservices? Here’s why you should consider microservices architecture for your business:
One of the biggest benefits of microservice architecture is that it decomposes apps into manageable services, therefore tackling the problem of speed and productivity.
Different teams can be working on different components of an app at the same time. Because there are no structural dependencies between microservices, a team never has to wait to create or change a microservice until another team finishes its work. Additionally, keep in mind that separate microservices are easier to locate and modify.
Because each microservice can be individually tested, you can speed up the quality assurance process. And, you can test components that have already been developed while still working on other components.
Another major benefit of microservices architecture is that it allows you to organize your teams and processes in line with your business priorities. In other words, microservices allow you to build products instead of projects.
Instead of writing glue code, your teams focus on building business functionality. Therefore, the services you create are adaptable for multiple contexts. You can reuse the same service in more than one business process and you can even use it through different business channels depending on your needs.
Each team member is responsible for a certain service, and this results in a smart, cross-functional team.
Perhaps the biggest benefit of microservices architecture is that it makes it easy to build and maintain apps. Microservices are all about simplicity.
When applications are split into smaller pieces, they become easier to build and maintain. It also becomes a lot easier to manage the code, because each microservice is a separate piece of code.
You can also implement services using different databases, programming languages, and software environments. This way, each service can be independently deployed, built, and redeployed, as well as managed.
For example, let’s say a microservice allocates too much memory or puts a heavy load on the processor. With microservices architecture, this only affects that particular service. In other words, a problem with one microservice does not affect the entire system.
Another major benefit of microservices is improved scalability.
Because each microservice can run autonomously, you’re more easily able to add, update, remove, and scale individual microservices. As we mentioned earlier, you can do this without disrupting other microservices in the application.
When demand for your application increases, all you need to do is divert or upgrade more resources to the microservice that are affected by the increased demands.
When calibrated appropriately, you can even use a container orchestration tool to automatically scale individual microservices. By only scaling the services that you need to, you save your company a lot of money on the cost of cloud server resources.
Microservices architecture also allows for better data security.
Information security becomes a concern when connections are established between microservices. However, with the use of secure APIs, you safeguard the data-transfer process by ensuring that information is accessible only to authorized users, applications, and servers.
If your microservices are managing sensitive financial, health, or other types of confidential information, secure APIs give you total control over which data is accessible to the larger application.
As you can see, microservices come with a lot of different benefits. Now, it’s time for you to decide if microservices architecture is right for your organization.
If you’re interested in learning more about microservices architecture and how it can help your business, contact us today.