Microservices or Microservice architecture is a traditional method to create cloud-based applications. All these cloud applications are built as a group of facilities, and every facility operates in their methods and interconnects among themselves via the application programming interfaces.
The framework of microservices is dispersed and lightly joined, so in case any team alters its terms, it won’t affect the total application system. The concept of microservices started 20 years earlier and has successfully evolved till now. The theories of microservices are there in the market even before the inception of modern web applications and have been there for more years than cloud containers. It is a way to develop and settle applications, and one advantage of using microservices is that it takes very little time to create new components of an application. This helps them to meet the business demands very quickly. Earlier in monolithic architecture, it became very difficult to scan and find problems in larger applications. Also, adding a new attribute was difficult in a monolithic architecture. But with the introduction of microservice architecture, solving these problems became easier, and it has enhanced the development speed of the application, and with it, the response time was also reduced.
What are Microservices?
Microservices are not just an architectural method but also an organized approach to developing software. Microservices break down these applications into tiny components. Each of these tiny components is itself a microservice. It deals with software that is a collection of several such tiny, self-governing services that interconnect in the cloud system through definite APIs. These services are generally formed by small, autonomous bodies. The measurement and scaling of the applications became easy with the inception of microservices architectures. With the help of microservices, applications can now develop very quickly, and it also introduced features like modernization and fast-tracking.
Unlike monolithic architecture, microservices are disjointed and work in an organized way to achieve the targets. Microservices give significant importance to granularity, and since it is lightweight, it has the capability to segment similar procedures across numerous applications. It also plays a vital role to optimize the development of an application. Microservices focus on forming single-function units with distinct interfaces and functions. In recent years, it has gained much popularity since several enterprises are shifting towards incessant testing.
People barely have any idea about the significance of having a microservice-based infrastructure. Microservices aims to offer superior software and faster results. However, having a microservice is not enough; you need to control them, arrange them, and fulfil the requirements.
Attributes of Microservice Architecture
Microservice architecture is an approach led by the DevOps teams which provide agility in developing, implementing, and handling the applications. There are six attributes of microservice architecture. They are:
1. Various Components
As mentioned in earlier stages, microservices are worn out into several component services. This is done so that every component can be separately organized and altered without declining the reliability of the application. Hence, if there is any fault, you would require replacing that specific service rather than redeploying the whole application. But this tactic can create complexity to the system and might be troublesome during remote calls.
2. Manufactured for Business
The microservices are totally built to work alongside the business competencies and significance. Previously, in a monolithic architecture, different sets of teams had the same goal. But microservice architecture exploits the cross-functional teams where each team is assigned a task to create definite products on the basis of services communicating through the message bus.
3. Easy Routing
The working of microservice architecture is fairly similar to the UNIX systems. At first, they accept the service request from the client and then process them to make a response. Microservices are designed with clever endpoints that progress information and apply reasoning through the channel of the information.
4. Decentralized
Microservices comprise a wide range of technologies and platforms where old-fashioned centralized governance isn’t considered the optimal solution. Hence, the administrative community of microservices prefers decentralized governance as its developing team attempts to make valuable tools that will help them to solve similar issues. Besides preferring decentralized governance, microservice architecture also prefers decentralized data management.
In monolithic architecture, the developing team uses one database for different applications wherein microservice architecture; the database is controlled by each service.
5. Resistant to Failure
Microservices are designed in such a way that they can deal with failures precisely. However, various distinct services work together in the system, and there is a possibility that any of these services might fail due to several reasons. In such scenarios, the client should give the permit to the next service to operate in its place.
6. Evolutionary Design
The microservice architectures follow an evolutionary model and are best suited for the evolutionary systems where access to the applications might not be anticipated totally.
Advantages of Microservice Architecture
The key advantages of having a microservice architecture are:
1. Better Productivity
The process of building and maintenance becomes easier when you break down the entire application into small components. According to the requirements, each module can be settled, organized, and managed separately. Microservices can also exploit several programming languages and technologies as per the requirements. Having a reduced codebase with modular elements increases scaling, and the services become more adaptable.
2. Flexibility
Having a microservice-based architecture offers comfort to the underlying development and also helps the DevOps team to find a solution for the major reason for the permanent issues. With the improved fault detecting ability, the chances of the whole system getting affected also decreases.
Therefore, the jeopardy of downtime is decreased as the development team can roll back, update, and alter the service module without reorganizing the whole application.
3. Enhanced Scalability
As the services are multilingual, it enables the development team to select the most suitable stack for each of the services without having fears about discordancy. That is why each service can be scaled separately, and new modules can be augmented without having interruption and redistribution of the total system. The services can also be set up on several servers. This will further decrease the impact.
4. Improved Functionality
Since Microservices focuses on individual services rather than the whole application, it becomes easier for them to deal with the requirements of each component and eventually results in improved business functionality. Working on single components allows microservices to
and that is why it results in improved business functionality. It is easier to and eventually concentrates on the business competencies instead of machinery. Moreover, there is no need to rebuild an entire system for the existing services; instead, they can be modified to use in various contexts.
5. Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)
Both Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery is part of the perceptions of the DevOps viewpoint and the agile methodology. Microservices enables the functional teams to improve, assess, resolve, organize, and update each service separately. This results in quicker development, and troubleshooting also become easier at times.
Disadvantages of Microservice Architecture
The key disadvantages of Microservice Architecture are:
1. Complex Communication
Since microservices deal with individual services, communication among different services becomes difficult. In this kind of situation, the developers persuasively need to write down extra coding lines to evade the disturbance. A further difficulty arises when isolated noises experience dormancy.
2. Extra Resources
More services mean you would require extra capital as well as assets.
3. Testing
When you want to test a microservices-based application globally, it can be problematic for you. In a monolithic architecture, this situation could be avoided with the introduction of WAR on the applications. Still, in microservices, before you start testing, you would require confirming the list of every dependent service.
4. Debugging
Since each service has different logs to progress, debugging becomes very much difficult.
5. Deployment
Sometimes deployment becomes an issue as there should be proper communication among the different services, and this coordination process may not be easy every time.
Not Ideal for Small Companies
Microservices are exceptional for larger companies, but it becomes slower and complicated when it comes to small companies as in there, creation and iteration need to be done quickly.
Conclusion
Microservice architecture offers cohesiveness to software development and has become a popular approach with bigger enterprises like Amazon, Netflix, Twitter, Paypal, and Spotify implementing it because of its advantages and returns.
Only time will tell whether microservices will become the desired approach for the developers and organizations or not. But as it looks now, microservice architecture is going to be the future with its thoughtful reimbursements for planning, designing, and executing enterprise applications. Already numerous organizers are implementing a similar approach without strengthening APIs that could be described as a microservice.