Skepticism by communities in software development dismisses Microservices architecture as nothing new, just an overhaul of the old SOA (service-oriented architecture). Despite all the uncertainties, microservices architecture pattern has emerged with a great amount of gratification to the enterprises – when it comes to enabling agile development and delivering complex enterprise solutions. According to a recent survey, over 63 percent of enterprises are using the microservice architecture. This includes organizations like Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Uber, and eBay.
Seeing this emerging popularity of the microservice architecture, you might have also wondered that you should adopt it in your business.
However, before this, we need to understand what the microservice architecture is and how it can help your business flourish.
What is the Microservice Architecture?
In the microservice architecture, we develop software as a collection of small service modules known as microservices where each microservice is loosely coupled, independent, and is designed to run a single task. These microservices communicate with other microservices through other communication channels like event hub and enterprise service bus.
Why do We Need the Microservices Approach?
For this, we must understand the limitations of the monolithic architecture that companies were using before the microservice approach.
Monolithic is a traditional software development architecture in which a software project is developed as a single block containing various components which are interdependent, interconnected, and tightly coupled.
Developing, testing, and deploying software using the monolithic approach is simple. However, it also has many drawbacks. For example, you can’t build apps using different technologies in monolithic, scale them in the future, or use CI/CD to accelerate deployment. Also, the software we develop in monolithic architecture is highly unreliable. A slight change in one function can impact the other parts of the app which are dependent on it.
The microservices approach can effectively resolve all these issues.
Microservices architecture advantages
The microservices architecture offers many significant benefits that the monolithic architecture failed to offer.
- You can selectively scale some features of an app rather than scaling it whole.
- You can use different technology stack to make your app more versatile.
- The microservice architecture allows you to speed up the deployment speed by shipping large apps in small modules.
- Teams of developers, testers, and DevOps Engineers work together to deliver apps faster.
- Since all the components of the app are independent, it will keep working even if there is an error in a module.
You can read more advantages of the microservices architecture in a blog we recently covered. It mentions in detail why companies are switching to microservices.
However, it is good sometimes, but not always…
Even if the microservices architecture resolves a lot of the issues that companies were facing in the monolithic architecture, it is not perfect. The architecture also has a lot of drawbacks:
- The microservices architecture is way more complex than the monolithic architecture. Handling the workflow on microservices is not as easy as it seems.
- Shifting to microservices also needs a cultural shift and not all companies might be ready for that.
- Handling multiple databases and transactions is not an easy task.
- Due to inter-service communication over the network and the need to handle multiple APIs, the security challenges increase for the companies.
- Compared to the monolithic architecture, microservices architecture is very costly.
Even if it’s been a while since microservices are in the industry, the monolithic vs microservices debate remains. No matter some companies have adopted and significantly benefited from microservices. Still, there are some organizations who believe that the monolithic approach is much better.
The truth is that both the monolith and the microservice architecture have their own set of advantages and disadvantages. While the monolithic approach has several disadvantages, the microservices approach is also not perfect. Instead, you need to figure out what works best for your business. For this, you need to learn about all the approaches in detail.
In case you need any help, you can get in touch with our experts.
