Dan Rao
Senior Solutions Architect
Reading Time: 5 minutes
The success of any business today depends on its ability to be agile and adapt to the ever-changing needs of its customers. Companies that continue using a monolithic application structure need to put the entire app on hold even to make minor modifications.
In today’s competitive market, exiting the scene even for short durations can lead to customers giving up and trying out competitors’ apps. Therefore, to stay relevant among customers, businesses need to find a way to be agile and make changes on the go without pausing their apps or taking breaks to add new features.
The Solution
Microservices allow businesses to create modular applications with various individually deployable services connected with APIs. When one service in the app needs to be modified or revamped, it can be quickly done without interrupting the availability of other connected services. Multiple teams can work on separate services, enabling quick and easy deployment.
An excellent analogy for how microservices work is the coordination in a theater play. During a play, if one of the actors requires a costume change or needs medical attention due to an unexpected injury, they bow out and exit the scene gracefully and unobtrusively. The play then continues with the rest of the actors continuing to play their roles and improvising to cover up for the lack of one crew member. Similarly, when one microservice needs modification or replacement, it can be quickly detached from the rest of the app and modified in real-time. The other services continue to function as usual, and business doesn’t stop.
When an app needs to be improved to suit new market demands, a new service can be developed independently and then connected to the rest of the services in the app using APIs. In this scenario, too, the app doesn’t need to be paused at any time, and business continues to run efficiently despite modifications and upgrades.
The efficiency of microservices not only minimizes downtime; it also reduces costs. De-grouping services and working on them individually eliminates the need for expensive machines. The cost of modifying an app will also be less as changes to one service won’t affect any other services in the app.
Therefore, microservices also allow you to cut infrastructure costs and optimize resources.
Microservices help businesses stay agile and adapt to the ever-changing needs of customers and the market. With microservices apps, Amazon can update its offerings on the go, Spotify can engage its customers through other apps like Uber, and Google can create new revenue streams by selling its APIs for other apps to use.
Apart from each service within a microservices app being able to communicate with each other, the entire app also has inherent interoperability. Microservices apps can communicate with each other if standards like HTTP and JSON are adopted across industries. Through this promise of connectivity and communication for seamless adjustment to change, microservices offer businesses a clear way forward and a smart way to stay relevant.
Thus, Microservices have steadily evolved into the most suitable application development approach for designing and deploying an IT architecture that meets the best practices and core capabilities of every business. It has been a catalyst for businesses to adopt a resilient digital strategy that meets the challenges posed by its external as well as internal environment.
With increasing competition and complexity of business environments, all modern businesses must have IT solutions that deliver a holistic and synonymous customer experience, across all platforms – physical as well as digital. Thus, businesses need to set up technology infrastructure that aligns the businesses’ core competencies and purpose with customer experiences. It will require businesses to actively take up constant upgrades and modifications of the technology set up, to remain in sync with the constantly changing business and customer demands.
Microservices have become an imperative part of every business’s digital strategy because the architecture offers to automate and enhance every function within the businesses’ software, making the system devoid of operational breakdowns, thereby making the business services agile and prompt. For example, microservices offer the opportunity to decompose the coupling between businesses’ supply chains and the back-end systems that fuel these chains with customer information. They also offer to automate the transfer of customer data across the core value points within a business, thereby simplifying physical as well as digital supply routes.
Similarly, microservices have been proven to offer several benefits for businesses, which are unique from those offered by SOAs or monolithic architectures.
Some key advantages for businesses adopting microservices architecture are:
Improved Business Agility and Time-to-Market:
The decoupling of business processes allows businesses to allocate greater time, cost, and resources to functions that are crucial to the present business goals and objectives. Similar choices can be made to scale up services that are in demand, rather than all the services at once. Eventually, it leads to exponential savings. Therefore, the microservice architecture helps businesses maintain laser focus and prioritize services as well as resources crucial to the current market demands, thereby making businesses more prompt and agile.
Hassle-free Migration and Upgrade:
Migration to a microservice architecture is not as complicated as developing a monolithic business software application from scratch. The federal nature of microservices allows businesses to quickly choose the useful microservice bundles, which developers can loosely integrate into business software, without any coding or language barriers. Additionally, the most attractive benefit of using microservices is the ability to quickly upgrade to faster-moving updates and functions, without requiring altering a complicated source code.
Optimization of Business Resources:
Undoubtedly, adopting the microservice architecture summons a capital investment for any business, as it involves a crucial digital transition that would result in a competitive strength for the businesses’ future. Despite some significant costs of setting up an expert team and the digital infrastructure, migrating to microservices is seen as a source of remarkable savings in the long run. By pushing the business to prioritize the most crucial processes and avoiding any additional expenses for repairs or system failures, microservice architecture proves to be highly time and cost-effective in the longer run. Additionally, by reducing the time to market, costs of maintaining and upgrading heavy source codes, etc., only leads to optimization of human and financial business resources.
Technological Freedom:
The microservice architecture comprises multiple loosely coupled, independent application services. Each of these can be built using a custom set of technologies. This architecture does not follow the ‘one-size fits’ approach. It supports the use of multiple programming languages and database back-ends. Developers are free to choose the set of technologies suited best for the function they want to develop. Therefore, businesses and developers have the flexibility to choose their tech stack for the business function they wish to build.
Continuous Delivery:
Microservices can significantly speed up the continuous delivery pipelines. In the traditional monolithic architectures, a single team of developers had to focus on all the aspects of the business software- the UI, the database, and the server-side logic. In the case of Microservices architecture, a single team focuses only on one specific functionality. Thus, multiple teams can simultaneously focus on distinctive functions of the same application, thereby increasing its agility and leading to enhanced continuous delivery.
Therefore, microservices architecture has successfully helped business organizations build high-performing, sustainable applications, effectively adapt to new changing technology and increase agility with fast-tracking time-to-market.