Speed is the new identity for the organizations. Developing the ability to adapt the agility is indispensable to sustain in competitive market.
Microservices is a distinct method of developing softwares that focus on single function modules. This architecture has properly defined interfaces and operations. It has a set of small services that work together, independently contributing towards fine-tuning of the software.
Why microservices are popular?
Developing applications with accurate sizes, features, and set of technical requirements is not always feasible. Expecting software of big size to function flawlessly even with any amount of alterations is a dream come true. Especially huge projects have huger challenges.
Gumption and field demand has an impractical connect. Actually, as the project grows the planning, budgeting, development, testing and implementation requires modification.
Benefits & Limitations of Microservices to large enterprise applications:
Benefits:
- Breaks the development and release in sprints
- Hi-speed development
- Modular approach to developing applications
- Each task is specialized
- Independent deployment and re-deployment of services
- Starts the web container quickly for faster deployment
- Increased production capacity
- Improved quality of each application
- Build scalable systems
- Automated processes
- Operates independently and responsibility
- Meet the unpredictable heavy demands
- Suitable for various team sizes
- Lightweight mechanism
- Easy to understand and modify
- Low risk software’s
- Servers are used more efficiently
- Easily manageable and reusable
- Flexibility to choose different tools and languages for each service
- Better control on premise architecture and cloud
- Easy integration with the third-party services
- User friendly and robust
- Connecting and Testing APIs to validate the data across microservices
- Fit to run on cloud/ Saas (Software as a Service App)
- It supports various servers e.g. IBM, Apache, Oracle, Web logic etc.
Limitations:
- Managing multiple sets of information for various services
- Chances of missing product clarity and service duplication
- Time consumed in checking the duplication and solving with de-duplication
- Burden of responsibility towards availability of services
- Checking service stability
- Additional efforts of developers for establishing connection between services
- Communicating between microservices
- Deploying applications and monitoring
- Teamwork is must to face the complexities rising due to distributed system
- It is work splitter to small junks but increases the load of task allocation.
How microservices enable organizational agility?
Usually systems are designed considering functioning on various individual servers. Microservices run the features and functions accurately with agility. It ensures that the entire system is never being down.
The services are small independent with specific purpose. We have overcome the past of application development that took months to reach the user. The updates required tedious planning and technical challenges in execution processes.
Microservices architecture involves creating software from many smaller independent services. Reusability fetches agility and maintains variety as purpose. Applications built with different programming languages may require different data storage techniques. There is no standard model of architecture making it more flexible.
Microservices is preference of developers for development and production. Survey covered companies of Europe, USA, and South Central Asia with varied employee size from 100 to 10000. Agility of 11% stakeholders is encouraging technical teams to explore microservices. Salability of applications is on top list for 69%, Faster deployment 64%; Quality improvement 41%, Experiment with architecture 34%, Flexibility of using tools and languages is 27%.
Best examples of microservices agility are sites like Amazon, eBay, Uber and Netflix, which are active 24×7. The performance of these sites is a benchmark for other sites and applications. The response time, ability to handle multiple requests and process in minimum time is commendable.
Approach: Multiple components not only help in building the software but maintaining it. Effort and energy saver for development team as there is no need to redeploy the entire application. Various approaches alleviate the enterprise in products or services innovation and deliver better.
Application programming interface: The API (application programming interface) is a set of independent module of programming instructions. It has communication protocols for communication between various components and tools for software building. API can specify an interface between an application and operating system. Most of the web based applications of banking software, e-commerce sites, social media, etc use APIs to request actions. Create set of specifications using format of HTTP – Hypertext Transfer Protocol, XML – Extensible Markup Language or JSON – JavaScript Object Notation. The external applications interface with one another with the standardized. The Twitter or Facebook API can get you access to inside data pertaining to the users, comments, posts for efficient service.
- Data-first approach: Existing data of organization used to evolve the services around in an application that can independently function using a part of data. You can also offer the data as self-supporting service.
- App first approach: It focuses on customization of applications for domain specific. The industry terminology interwoven in creating applications can make designing easy. Constructing APIs or complete microservice is the choice. No needs to create DB server or coding just customize API.
- Code first approach: Coding is starting without building a database of creating a simple data.
- Model first approach: It helps defining the functions of the application. It makes the database readable for people and writable in JSON document; it converts the metadata and customizes API.
Automation: The process automation eases out the routine activities, migration, import, and export of data and applications. It creates development environment with minimal obstacle.
Business Context: The software applications are lightweight and released faster making extraction of returns for investment worth it. The demand met on priority, and the alterations have load bearing not crushing costs.
Market Culture: Speed and accuracy is not just the trend but current market culture. Companies need to opt for appropriate services in order to fulfil customer expectations.
Decentralised: API instances created on premise architecture or the private/ public cloud as SaaS is efficient and has no geographical constraints. Distributed and accessed freely from anywhere.
Define: Each layer interacts with the service such as logical, messaging, and data integration. The logic layer is about coding to execute some operation, to call and process or update the data. Integration layer takes care of access to data in context of the query. Every service utilized through API, which includes search, pagination, and documentation.
Independence: UI via API taps each business process like the customer logic, billing and delivery logic, event logic etc. to access the particular database. Process the queries 20-30 times faster. No single boundary for the entire application enabling well defined interactions. The microservice does not need to store the data for each process separately. It can pull from other services hence every user access obtains consistent updated results. E.g. For events, the data pulling from customer database is possible.
Isolation of Services: The resource isolation at the operating system level and not just machine level produces speedy results. The strategy of using containers can include CPU, memory, network access, and factors affecting performance of services.
Record Keeping: We can keep records of every transaction and the changes as audit trail. High quality and maintainable data, accessible at touch of fingertips.
Ultimately, microservices will transform the IT enterprise wholly. Every product, service, and feature needs to have nous solutions. Microservices brings agility in approach of organizations designing software systems. Extremely recommended for domain driven design, eventual data consistency, continuous delivery, distributed system and standardized web service.
