Over the past years, several technologies, architectural patterns, and best technological practices have emerged. Microservices is one of these architectural concepts that has evolved from a world of domain-driven design, continuous delivery, platform and infrastructure automation, scalable systems, and multilingual programming.
What Is Microservices?
Microservices architecture or microservices are a specific method of designing software systems that construct a single application as a collection of loosely coupled services.
Typically applications were built using monolithic architecture. Now, developers have realized that some types of applications are easier to build and maintain when they are deconstructed into smaller pieces that work in tandem with one another.
Though this has increased the complexity of app development and management, microservices offer many advantages over the monolithic structure.
Why Are Microservices Better Than Monolithic Architecture?
Since microservices are smaller groups of services, they can be built by one or more small teams from scratch. The microservice container is separated by service boundaries which makes it easier to scale up with minimum development effort.
Once developed these services can be deployed independently of each other. This makes it easier to identify hot services and scale them independent of the whole application.
Microservices also provide improved fault isolation. In the case of an error in one of the services, the whole application doesn’t have to stop functioning. When the error is repaired, it can be deployed for that service instead of redeploying the entire application.
Another advantage that microservices offer is the flexibility when it comes to technology stacks (programming languages, databases, etc.). You can choose a technology that best suits the required functionality or service instead of taking a more standardized, one-size-fits-all approach.
How Do Microservices Work?
Microservices are a set of independent services that act in unison to make a whole application operate. This architecture utilizes APIs to transfer information such as user queries or data streams, from one service to another. How the underlying software works or which hardware the service is built upon depends entirely on the development team.
Open source container systems such as Kubernetes have helped microservices to evolve. VM images have also been used as the deployment mechanism for microservices, but containers are efficient as they allow the code to be deployed on any compatible OS. This OS can exits anywhere: in the public cloud, on the premises, or in a hypervisor.
Final Thoughts
Whether or not microservice architecture becomes the preferred style of developers in the future, it has the potential that offers multiple benefits for developing and deploying applications. In the evolution of software architecture to date, microservices have been able to address and solve the problems with segmentation and communication that arise in application development.
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