Microservice architecture is one of the most trending approaches that are growing day by day. By hearing the name of microservice, there are things which came into our mind.
- What is it?
- Why do we need it?
- When do we use it?
So, to know more about it, let’s have a detailed look. However, here we are going to discuss only the vital points of microservice.
Microservice Introduction
Microservice is a single application with a bunch of loosely coupled services. We can consider each service as a module, an independent module. This means there is no relationship associated between them and they can be deployed autonomously. For instance, consider a shopping site where there are different functionalities like products, payment, shipping and user management. Instead of using all these features in a single application, we are going to build self-contained services for each of them. In the below diagram, it’s clear that there is no dependency between any one of the modules. Each one of them will run on its own. Nowadays, there are many large organizations which are using microservices. Some of them are: Netflix, Twitter, Amazon, PayPal, eBay etc.
Microservice Architecture Example Diagram
Needs of Microservice
Before discussing when we need it, we must check why we need to choose microservice. Here are some important reasons for using microservices.
- Scalability: As microservice support different components, it can be easily accomplished. This will result in providing high performance and availability.
- Resiliency: In a monolithic approach, a simple failure in the code may affect the entire application execution. Unlike monolithic methods, microservice gives us less impact on code failure.
- Debugging and Maintenance: As we are using different chunks of modules, debugging the application and managing it becomes much easier.
- By using different kinds of cloud technologies like AWS and Azure, managing the microservice can be accomplished more easily.
- With the help of microservice, we can have much faster deployment and redeployment of our application.
Microservice may not be a good choice for all organizations and applications. Depending on the features and scenarios, we have to check if this is the right option for our application/organization. Here are some scenarios when we can use microservice architecture in our applications and organizations.
If your application needs to accommodate scalability, agility, manageability, and delivery speed, then microservice is the best choice that you can consider. When you have to develop a large and complex application which needs more feature implementation in the future, understating the code and managing it becomes easier while using the microservice. Moreover, the developer can concentrate on one particular code block which will result in a better understanding of the code instead of worrying about the complex dependency associated with it.
For large and complex applications, microservice is the best choice. This will help to manage the complexity of large applications by dividing them into small independent units. In this way, we can develop, test, and manage the whole application as separate modules which reduces the task and effort over time.
If your applications need to handle high traffic and scalability, you can choose microservice without thinking twice. By using this architecture, scalability and high traffic can be achieved by using specific parts of the entire application. The load can be shifted to a particular module depending on its needs and usage. This feature is most useful when we have a website like e-commerce during the peak seasons. The high traffic to the website can be handled easily by using microservice.
These services can be containerized and deployed in multiple servers which reduces the impact of point of failure. Maintaining a separate module means even if one of the services goes down, there will be other services which will be working fine without affecting the application. However, using a monolithic approach may result in the failure of the entire application.
In addition to that, code reusability is one of the major attractions. So, if your application supports basic functionalities like user registration, authentication, login, etc., using microservice will make it easier to work on it. Furthermore, more than one development team can work on the same applications at the same time in their microservice without affecting the development of any other team. Developers can communicate with each other and create and manage fully self-independent API’s for their microservices.
Implementation and usage of different technologies are possible with microservice. If your applications need different technology slack for the application, then that is also possible with microservice. For example, for a single application, we can use more than one technology depending on our needs and functionalities. By this, we can develop each module with its best-suited technology; this will not have any impact on the application.
Deploying and managing applications becomes effective with the help of microservices. What will happen if our applications need change or feature implementation? We have to make the necessary changes and deploy the entire application again. Microservice allows us to deploy only a single module which has changes implemented rather than the entire application. This will make the feature implementation and bug fixes in the entire application without making changes to the entire application.
In conclusion, we can use microservice architecture depending on our needs and requirements. Using a microservice approach makes it easier for developers to work on the code and it will provide high consistency and availability including scalability of the application. The above-specified conditions using microservice is the best choice.
