Microservices architecture is an architectural approach or style of application development. It involves dividing large applications into smaller functional units that are capable of functioning and communicating independently.
It is for overcoming monolithic architectural approaches to application development. Monolithic architecture is mainly like a large container holding all software components of an application: user interface, business layer, and data interface.
This has many limitations, including inflexibility, lack of reliability, difficulty scaling, slow development, etc. To bypass these issues, microservices architecture was created.
Applications running on this architecture are deconstructed and separated into smaller units (microservices) that clients can access using an API gateway. These microservices are independently deployable and can communicate with one another when necessary.
Breaking down an application into microservices allows us for faster development, easier bug detection and resolution, smoother maintenance, flexibility, and higher availability and scalability.
How Microservices Architecture works?
It focuses on classifying large, bulky applications. Each microservice addresses an application’s particular aspect and function, such as logging, data search etc.
This intuitive, functional division of an application has several benefits. Clients can use the user interface to generate requests. At the same time, one or more microservices are commissioned through API gateway to perform the requested task. As a result, even larger complex problems that require a combination of microservices can be solved very easily.
Microservices are independent releasable services modeled around a business domain. A service encapsulates a functionality and makes it accessible to other services via networks.
One microservice might represent inventory, another order management, and another shipping, but together they might constitute an entire eCommerce system. Microservices are an architecture choice that gives us many options for solving the problems we might face.
Key benefits of microservices architecture
Using this architecture in application development is highly beneficial. Some of its key benefits are
- Less development effort
- Provides better scalability
- Independent deployment
- Provides improved fault isolation
- No dependence on one Tech Stack
Less development effort
Due to the independent nature of microservices, development teams can parallelly work on different components to update existing functionalities. This makes it significantly easier for identifying hot services, scale independently from the rest of the application, and improve the application.
Provides better scalability
Microservices launch individual services independently which may be developed in different languages or technologies. All tech stacks are compatible which allows DevOps to choose any of the most efficient tech stacks without fearing if they will work well together.
These small services work on relatively less infrastructure than monolithic applications by choosing the precise scalability of selected components per their requirements because this scalability is better with microservices.
Independent deployment
Each microservice constituting an application must be a full stack. This facilitates the deployment of microservices independently at any point. Since microservices are granular in nature, it’s easy for development teams to work on one microservice to fix errors and then redeploy it without redeploying the entire application.
Provides improved fault isolation
In monolithic applications, failure of even a small component of the overall application can make it inaccessible. In some cases, determining the error could be a tedious task.
With the usage of microservices, isolating the problem-causing component is easy since the entire application is divided into standalone, fully functional software units. If any errors occur, other non-related units will still continue to function.
No dependence on one Tech Stack
A technology stack refers to a set of programming languages, databases, front-end, and back-end tools, frameworks, and other components that the developers use to build an application.
With microservices, developers have the freedom to pick any technology stack that is best suitable for one particular microservice and its functions. They have full control of opting for one standardized tech stack that encompasses all of an application’s functions.
Use of microservices architecture
It makes application development quicker and more efficient. Some of the important applications of a microservices architecture are:
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Data processing
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Media content
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Website migration
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Transactions and invoices
Data processing
Microservices speed up data processing tasks because applications running on microservice architecture can handle more simultaneous requests. Processing of large amounts of information is possible in less time, allowing faster and more efficient application performance.
Media content
Companies like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video handle billions of API requests each and every day. Services such as OTT platforms that offer users massive media content will benefit from deploying a microservices architecture. Microservices also ensure that the plethora of requests for different subdomains worldwide is happening without delays or errors.
Website migration
Website migration contains substantial change and redevelopment of a website’s major areas, such as its domain, structure, user interface, etc. Using microservices will help us avoid business-damaging downtime and ensure our migration plans execute smoothly without any hassles.
Transactions and invoices
Microservices are perfect for applications that handle high payments and transaction volumes and generate invoices for the same. The failure of an application to process payments causes huge losses for companies. With the help of microservices, the transaction functionality has become more robust without changing the rest of the application.
Conclusion
In conclusion, we can say that microservices architecture is one of the best architectures any developer can use and the benefits it offers makes it one of the most trustworthy architectures that you can use in any application.
