Let's start by defining what microservices are. They are a way to break large software projects into loosely coupled modules that communicate with each other through simple application programming interfaces (APIs).
Microservices have become increasingly popular in recent years. They are an example of the modular architecture style, based on the philosophy of breaking large software projects into smaller, independent, loosely coupled pieces.
This architectural style has gained prominence among developers for its dynamic and agile qualities in API management and execution of highly defined applications and discrete tasks.
In simple terms, microservices are nothing more than another architectural solution for designing complex applications — mostly web-based.
In this article, we will understand what are the advantages that microservices architectures offer.
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The theory behind microservices
One of the main driving forces behind any type of architectural solution is scalability. Many professionals in the world of software architecture and development gravitate towards a book called The Art of Scalability.
The defining model of the book was the Scale Cube, which describes three dimensioning dimensions:
As you can see, the X axis represents the horizontal scaling of the application (which we have seen is possible even with monolithic architecture), and the Z axis represents the scaling of the application by splitting similar things.
The Z-axis idea can be better understood using the concept of sharding, where data is partitioned and the application redirects requests to the corresponding shards based on user input (as is typically done with databases).
The Y axis represents the functional decomposition. In this approach, several functions can be seen as independent services.
Instead of deploying the entire application when all components are available, developers can independently deploy their respective services.
Not only does this improve developer time management, it also gives you greater flexibility to change and redeploy your modules without worrying about the rest of the application's components.
Advantages of microservices architectures
The advantages of microservices seem strong enough to convince some big corporate players, such as Amazon, Netflix and eBay, to adopt the methodology.
Compared to more monolithic design frameworks, microservices offer:
- Better fault isolation: Larger applications can remain largely unaffected by a single module failure.
- Eliminates vendor or technology dependency: microservices provide the flexibility to try out a new technology stack on an individual service as needed. There won't be as many dependency worries and reversing changes becomes much easier. With less code at play, there is more flexibility.
- Ease of understanding: more simply, developers can better understand the functionality of a service.
- Smaller, faster deployments: smaller codebases and scope = faster deployments, which also lets you start exploring the benefits of continuous deployment.
- Scalability: because your services are separate, you can more easily scale the ones you need most at the appropriate times, as opposed to the entire application. When done correctly, this can affect cost savings.
Deployment of microservices
Now that we understand microservices, how are they deployed?
The best way to deploy microservices-based applications is within containers, which are complete virtual operating system environments that provide processes with isolation and dedicated access to underlying hardware resources. One of the biggest names in solutions for Containers at the moment is Docker.
Virtual machines from infrastructure providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) can also work well for microservices deployments.
As application development trends continue to evolve, the debate between using microservices or leveraging traditional monolithic architectures will only become more pronounced. In the end, developers must do their due diligence and understand what works for their specific use cases.
For smaller companies, starting with a monolithic application can be simpler, faster, and cheaper — and if the product hasn't matured much, it can still be migrated to microservices at the appropriate time.
Large enterprises with millions of users are obvious examples of the best use case for microservices as they need to ensure the uptime and scalability that added modularity can provide.
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