Over 63% of organizations are using microservices – a global survey by Camunda reveals. The statistics make it clear that microservices are becoming mainstream. Also, the majority of companies are adopting microservices architecture to achieve significant results.
While microservices have created a buzz around, organizations are thoughtlessly adopting their practices. It is true that microservices have several benefits. But they often overlook the tradeoffs it brings along. The intricacies, skillsets required to integrate the new system and data management abilities can be overwhelming for unprepared organizations.
Hence, companies should consider certain aspects before making the decision of switching to microservices to be able to enjoy their essence. Here are 5 crucial considerations businesses shouldn’t miss on:
1. Understanding Microservice Architecture
To leverage the microservices architecture, it is important to understand its know-how. For most of the companies, Microservices is all about building macro services and well-defined system design. For some others, it is an efficient way to modernize their business processes. Some believe building too many small services would fulfill their purpose while others ruin it by developing too big microservices. Amid these inadequacies, the real meaning and business objective is lost.
Well, microservice architecture is based on the principle of building applications as a set of small functionalities, each with its own process and lightweight channels for interaction.
To make the most out of it, it is crucial for businesses to align the concept of microservices with their business goals and then take the decision. Hence, only with proper understanding, planning, documentation, and testing can businesses achieve the desired results.
We have even written a detailed blog about microservices. You can refer to it if you want to understand the microservice architecture more clearly.
2. Deciding on the Technology Stack
Choosing the right technology stack (programming language, cloud provider, testing and logging framework, storage, infrastructure, monitoring) for monolithic architecture is difficult. However, it is even more difficult with microservice architecture as you need to do this for each microservice. Here, choosing standardized technology seems pointless. Moreover, shifting between teams becomes harder if every team is using a different technology stack.
Hence, before deciding to opt for microservice transformation, businesses should decide if they should go for a default stack across the application or need a different stack for their microservices. Determining the pros and cons of each case might help in making the right decision. Considerations for selecting the right technology:
- Appropriate for a specific microservice use case.
- Competencies of your development team.
- Offers a lot of support (e.g. resources, community).
- Availability of libraries that could be used to speed up the project.
- Fault tolerance, maintainability, and scalability.
3. Organizing your Code
When you start moving to microservices, you should consider asking, “How will we organize our codebase? Should we create a repository (multiple repositories) for each service? Or whether creating a single “mono repo” will serve our purpose?”
Since multiple repositories comprise smaller codebases, these are easier to manage allowing developers to develop and deploy a full stack of a microservice independently. However, this option doesn’t fit well with big, distributed organizations and often causes chaos due to a large number of microservices with their own repository.
On the contrary, choosing to build a mono-repo offers advantages of better development testing, reduced code complexity, effective code reviews, sharing of common components while allowing to develop and deploy the application independently.
The decision of choosing between mono repo and multiple repositories depends on factors like the size of your organization, nature of services and a well-informed team. Hence, assess your situation first and then reach a conclusion.
4. Microservice Environment Challenges
While microservices offer a range of advantages over monolithic approach, it has its own set of challenges.
- It is difficult for organizations to refactor services out of a monolithic application all at once. Doing this can introduce new bugs in the existing application. Also, implementing new functionalities at once to monolith can create further complications. Instead, refactoring of services should be done in smaller parts with extending the microservices offerings in a way to substitute the old monolith code.
- Integrating different microservices is another challenge for organizations. Tying the integration between services to some specific technology might cause issues when the team wants to use varied programming languages. Instead, developers should use a language-independent technology.
- Organizations also face infrastructure challenges including unavailability of tools and technologies like Docker, Kubernetes, etc. to automate, deploy, manage and scale different microservices.
- Monitoring a monolithic application is easier than a microservice application. There needs to be good logging in microservices that is easily searchable in case of failures. With this, it becomes easier to find which microservice is going down which otherwise gets difficult.
5. Reorganizing the Team
For a microservice architecture to perform well, it is important that each of the microservice is developed, deployed and maintained independently. And to achieve this, businesses need to re-organize their teams. It is better to appoint an independent team to work on each microservice separately. Having your developers work on numerous microservices might lead to decisions that do not correlate well for each microservice.
The Takeaway
Microservices are a way for companies to boost their business performance pushing them towards constant growth. Unfortunately, microservices are not a free lunch. And a poorly conceived attempt of shifting from your traditional approach to microservices may turn out to be an inevitable disaster. Hence, it is better to understand this methodology and accordingly evaluate your organization, its infrastructure, technologies you use, and the resources you have in order to prevent losses.
Softobiz understands the shortcomings organizations have for switching to microservice architecture. Hence, we offer complete software development services using microservices freeing you from losing your money and efforts into it.
Talk to our experts if you need more guidance about microservices transformation.
