As the world of technology evolves at warp speed, so does the approach to building and maintaining digital applications. Microservices architecture, an approach where a single application is developed as a suite of small services, has become increasingly popular among developers. Its popularity growth is due to the inherent benefits microservices bring, including the ability to develop, deploy, and scale components independently. Here are some of the most important arguments for using microservices.
With monolithic applications, scalability is often an issue. If one part of your application needs to scale up to support increased demand, you're forced to scale the entire application. With microservices, however, you can scale independently, allowing you to be more resource-efficient and saving you critical financial resources.
Microservices are easy to understand because they're designed to do one thing very well. A developer looking to make changes doesn't need to understand the entire application - just the specific service they're dealing with. This streamlines the development process and allows faster adaptation to changing business requirements.
Microservices allow development teams to work on different services independently. This means different teams can use the programming languages and frameworks better suited to the service they're working on. As a result, productivity increases as teams can function autonomously and parallelly, reducing overall development time.
In a monolithic architecture, if one application component fails, it can affect the entire system. However, in a microservices architecture, services are loosely coupled and isolated. This results in high fault isolation: if one service fails, the other continues functioning normally.
Microservices can be easily integrated with various tools for automatic deployment, continuous integration, and delivery. Docker and Kubernetes, for example, are commonly used tools that allow developers to package, deploy, and manage microservices efficiently.
One of the most significant benefits of microservices is the freedom to use different technologies and programming languages across services. Developers can choose the most appropriate tech stack for each service, making the application more efficient and effective.
With a microservices architecture, managing the software lifecycle becomes easier. Deploying, updating, or scaling one service can happen independently of others and doesn't require taking down the entire application. This supports agile practices and continuous development and deployment.
Microservices offer tangible benefits over traditional monolithic architectures, particularly in scalability, productivity, fault isolation, and software lifecycle management. They offer an unrivalled level of flexibility and independence, allowing developers to create more resilient, efficient, and high-performing applications.
One More Thing
Though there is significant value in implementing microservices and the architecture has valid cases, beginning a project with a full-scale set of microservices is rarely optimal. More often than not, applications begin more monolithic and have components phased out into microservices. Before you try developing a whole application as a set of microservices, identify which components of your application should be microservices, if any. They should be highly reusable components that are indifferent to the environment they are servicing.