Dan Rao
Senior Solutions Architect
Reading Time: 4 minutes
Take a look at the 12 Features of Microservices:
1. Easier to Develop and Modify
Single microservice codes are smaller and more focused than monolithic applications. As a result, experimentation and testing get easier with incremental code updates. While the overall functionality of the service remains very similar to a monolithic application, the enforced decoupling of the code makes it easier to develop, modify and enhance. In this case, there is hardly any risk of the applications becoming ‘black boxes,’ wherein the source code is too complex to dive into.
2. Simplified Cross-Team Coordination
Any large-scale business IT infrastructure comprises multiple integration points, coordination, and maintenance of which becomes an unmanageable task. Even in the case of an SOA, one requires elaborate planning to determine how the data reaches its destination integration point. In contrast, microservices deal with low volumes of data, communicated using simple messaging systems like the JMS. These lightweight messaging protocols, used within the API, avoid complications in the coordination topology.
3. Enhances Performance and Scalability
In the case of microservices, developers must concentrate on individual services, rather than the whole application. Therefore, it gets easier to scale a few services, as per the changing business demands, rather than scaling an entire application at once. The concept uses the divide-and-conquer strategy, whereby integrating multiple microservices helps to harness power from multiple CPUs and RAM, leading to efficient and quicker processing of data. In this manner, microservices offer high scalability and enhanced performance.
4. Improved Data Security
Microservices allow for decentralized data handling and storage. Small teams take accountability and responsibility for specific services, avoiding centralized storage or handling of data. It leads to increased data security as all teams work in silos. Every service is only loosely connected to other services, thereby ensuring maximum security and reliability for the safety of stored data.
5. Ease of Maintenance, Troubleshooting and Extension
Due to the decentralized and federal nature of microservices, running ongoing maintenance checks and troubleshooting issues in a particular microservice can be done easily, without disrupting the operational flow of the other microservices. One can easily add new functions or update existing functions without requiring complicated changes or understanding of the source code, as in the case of monolithic architecture. Therefore, maintenance, problem-solving and adding codes are easier and risk-free in the case of microservices architecture.
6. Freedom to Reuse Codes
Microservice Architecture does not follow the “one-size fits all” approach. Every service is a well-defined, self-sufficient component that performs a specific function within an application. Therefore, developers can use these microservice codes in every application that calls for a particular function. Also, a service written for one application, can become a foundation block for another function. This allows applications to bootstrap off themselves, while developers can reuse the same codes in innovative ways and create new capabilities, without having to write codes from scratch.
7. Multiple Components
Microservices software is designed with multiple component services that can be independently deployed, modified, and redeployed without compromising the entire application. Some downsides of this approach might be coarser-grained remote APIs and more complexity in redistributing responsibilities among components.
8. Simple Routing
Microservices have smart endpoints for processing the info and applying logic and dumb pipes for the information to flow through. Like the classical UNIX system, microservices receive requests, process them, and deliver a relevant response. This routing process is much more straightforward than ESBs (Enterprise Service Buses), which have high-tech message routing systems, choreography, and business rules.
9. Failure Resistant
Many diverse services communicating together in microservices may result in the possibility of some failures. However, when one service fails, the neighboring services continue to function seamlessly, thereby preventing complete software system failure. By simply monitoring microservices, even individual service failure can be prevented. Therefore, the microservices system architecture is more failure-resistant than a monolithic systems architecture.
10. Decentralized
Since various technologies are involved in microservices, decentralized governance is favored. Microservice developers try to create tools that are also useful for solving the same problems in different systems. Decentralized data management is also preferred in a microservices application, with each service typically managing its own unique database.
11. Built For Business
A microservice software is usually designed around business priorities and capabilities. Microservices applications use cross-functional teams, with each team trying to make specific products based on individual services communicating via message bus. The team that creates a product owns it for its lifetime.
12. Evolutionary
Microservices architecture is ideal for systems where it is impossible to predict the types of devices accessing an application. Many apps start with a monolithic architecture but require an evolutionary system when unforeseen requirements surface. Accordingly, these apps can slowly switch to a microservices architecture, with individually changeable services built over a monolithic architecture using APIs.