The term “Microservice Architecture” has sprung up over the last few years to describe a particular way of designing software applications as suites of independently deployable services. While there is no precise definition of this architectural style, there are certain common characteristics around organization around business capability, automated deployment, intelligence in the endpoints, and decentralized control of languages and data.
“Microservices” – yet another new term on the crowded streets of software architecture. Although our natural inclination is to pass such things by with a contemptuous glance, this bit of terminology describes a style of software systems that we are finding more and more appealing. We’ve seen many projects use the opposite conventional style “Monolithic Architecture” in the last few years. In a very recent time, few of our colleagues got concerned of a new project in enterprise solution based on Microservice. Sadly, however, there’s not much information that outlines what the microservice style is and how to do it. And henceforth our team started to look forward to express our thoughts and experience so far.
So, what exactly is a Microservices Architecture?
Fundamentally, based on my understanding thus far, it is an architecture where things are small islands of functionality accessible only by well-defined messages. That is the nutshell, at least.
These islands are deployed independently, and they sit atop an underlying messaging infrastructure / platform that abstracts away the complexities of load balancing, service location, etc. This provides you:
- The ability to code simply in your services, and to obtain operational goodies including highly distributed, vertical and horizontal scalability, etc.
- Enabling modularity and responsibility segregation, qualities that increase the autonomy of individual development teams, as they’ll be working on tasks with well-defined borders, decoupling dependencies and reducing overlapping with other teams’ work
- Allows dev teams to choose the tools that best suit their needs for each problem in hand
- DevOps teams love this approach as microservices should be easy to deploy and run in their own containers.
Monolithic Vs. Microservices
Microservices are an important software trend and one that can have profound implications not just on the enterprise IT function, but the digital transformation of the entire business. Microservices vs monolithic architecture represents a fundamental shift in how IT approaches software development, and one which has been successfully adopted by organizations like Netflix, Google, Amazon, IBM, and others. But what are microservices’ advantages over a monolithic architecture?
First, let’s compare microservices vs monolithic architecture. By contrast, microservice capabilities are expressed formally with business-oriented APIs. They encapsulate a core business capability, and as such are valuable assets to the business. The implementation of the service, which may involve integrations with systems of record, is completely hidden as the interface is defined purely in business terms.
A monolithic server is a natural way to approach building such a system. All your logic for handling a request runs in a single process, allowing you to use the basic features of your language to divide up the application into classes, functions, and namespaces.
Shifting towards Microservices?
A microservices-based architecture eschews many of monolithic architecture’s problems that can create technical debt, and in turn, brings measurable cost savings in both time and speed to market.
Reducing technical debt is an important benefit offered by microservices; however, measurable savings do not end with just technical debt. Microservices offers other benefits to the business which can reduce costs and impact the bottom line. Those benefits include:
- Agility: By breaking down functionality microservice removes the painful process of integration normally associated with monolithic applications. Microservices speed development, turning it into processes that can be accomplished in weeks and not months.
- Efficiency: Leveraging a microservices based architecture can result in far more efficient use of code and underlying infrastructure. It is not uncommon to experience significant cost savings by as much as 50% by reducing the amount of infrastructure required to run a given application.
- Resiliency: By dispersing functionality across multiple services eliminates an applications susceptibility to a single point of failure. Resulting in applications which can perform better, experience less downtime and can scale on demand.
- Revenue: Faster iterations and decreased downtime can increase revenue (either using al through efficiencies created via a chargeback ideology or by improving user engagement).
Microservices can deliver better agility and scalability advantages than any other paradigm, so consider adopting for applications that have extreme requirements in these areas. While they’re maturing rapidly, complete and robust mainstream platforms are probably at least a year away. However, there are also drawbacks with microservices, such as:
- potentially too much granularity;
- extra effort designing for communication between services;
- latency during heavy use;
- complex testing.
Market Status
In the increasingly competitive diverse enterprises industries, speed-to-market, ability to innovate, the efficiency of processes, and agility of systems are supremely important for any business to stay ahead of the competition. The market is growing and getting diverse with the needs. The market witnesses a high growth opportunity in the retail and communication segments as they are generating an extensive volume of data that needs to be stored and secured.
Microservices Architecture Market by Vertical
- Healthcare
- BFSI
- Government
- IT & Telecommunication
- Manufacturing
- Retail
- Energy & Utilities
- Media, Entertainment and Others
The Global Market of Microservice Architecture is growing rapidly mainly due to the Cloud based solutions (SaaS). According to a recent study report published by the Market Research Future, the global market of Microservice Architecture is booming and expected to gain prominence over the forecast period. The market is expected to grow at approx. USD 33 Billion by 2023, at 17% of CAGR between 2017 and 2023. Asia-Pacific is expected to be the fastest growing market as large number of organizations are adopting microservices architecture to enterprise business to meet needs of modern application development.
In businesses across industries—from telecommunications and retail to financial services and manufacturing—IT teams are choosing microservices to develop new applications and break down monoliths. Every microservice can be deployed, upgraded, scaled, and restarted independently of other services in the application. When managed by an automated system, teams can frequently update live applications without negatively impacting users. So, if you think your organization is ready to face all these, then you’re better off with the majestic move towards Microservice.
We look forward to covering our views on the role of microservices and the game-changing business shift. We encourage you to share your thoughts in the contact form. We would enjoy hearing your perspective.