A 2021 IBM survey of 1200+ IT executives and developers reveals that more than 88% of the microservices’ users agree about the “many benefits” that this advanced architectural style can offer for development. Considering that 77% of the non-users also agree with the aforementioned inference, it’s undeniable that the microservices model captures the interest of wide groups of practitioners.
Does that mean that organizations’ decisions to continue developing on legacy (monolithic) architectures will be detrimental? Not necessarily. However, if they’re willing to invest in cloud infrastructure and want to remain competitive in the market, it’s safe to assume that they’ll have to rethink their development strategies.
With the lack of a distributed architecture and scaling capabilities, they will likely be at a disadvantage in terms of speed, agility, cost-efficiency, and time-to-market.
That said, let’s explore the core benefits of microservices for cloud applications.
Microservices: Why Is This the Preferred Architectural Style?
The rise of microservices can be attributed to the pitfalls in the monolithic application development model. The latter has been around for years and involves creating a single application out of many functionalities. As such, a monolithic app works great when the project is small, but as it grows, scaling becomes difficult.
Contrarily, the microservices approach is based on decomposing a large application into several small applications, all of which communicate via asynchronous mechanisms driven by APIs. Hence, there’s no need to lay out complex enterprise infrastructures to support thousands of endpoints and hundreds of application features. In fact, each micro-application can be scaled individually as per the need.
Let’s understand it via an example: Imagine that you have to build an application that manages online advertising campaigns. You’ll have to create functionalities dedicated to creating ads, targeting them, optimizing them, and so on. However, those components can have an independent life cycle. In that case, an application built on the monolithic architecture would entail a single codebase and an engine that orchestrates all of the features. With microservices, on the other hand, you’d have a separate codebase for each component. So, whenever you’d want to tweak the things related to one of the functionalities, you’d have to make changes in only that component and not the other ones.
Why Are Microservices In-Demand in the Cloud Computing Environment?
O’Reilly’s recent report on the adoption of microservices unearths how this architectural style is widely adopted across development teams ranging from startups to large enterprises. The report affirms that more than 75% of the developers/decision-makers (from those surveyed) have adopted microservices. Out of them, 92% have already derived success out of their modernized development endeavors.
First off, it’s noteworthy that the adoption of microservices doesn’t necessitate the cloud as the hosting destination. Nevertheless, it’s easy to point out the direct proportionality between the success of microservices and cloud adoption. Following are the advantages of using microservices for cloud applications:
- Scalability (Independent Updation): Perhaps the most crucial advantage that microservices architecture has over monolithic is that it can be scaled as per need and that, too, independently. This means that a single micro-application or even a function (“function” here represents micro-application handling only one function) can be scaled up and down to accommodate more requests without affecting the rest of the application infrastructure.
- Agility: Microservices allow businesses to respond faster to market demands and undertake agile development strategies. This is possible through the use of asynchronous APIs. Because of this, micro-services aren’t tightly coupled and don’t need to rely on a single bus. This factor translates to a faster release cycle, resulting in lower operational costs and a higher speed-to-market.
- Fault Isolation: Although much more open with regards to the separation of functionalities, microservices-based cloud applications actually provide higher security because the application altogether cannot be compromised. The isolation of every component prevents vulnerability from spreading across the entire structure.
- Easier Maintenance and Simple Configuration: One of the biggest concerns with an in-house application is the difficulty of performing maintenance, especially when multiple teams/developers are working on it. Management of applications by decomposing them into microservices not only makes maintenance and configuration easier but also allows greater control for developers. As such, the aforementioned capabilities allow them to code cloud applications from scratch warding off the need for legacy infrastructure (hosting, network, storage, databases, and so on).
- Continuous Integration/ Continuous Delivery (CI/CD): The ability to roll out multiple applications simultaneously on the cloud and manage even the smallest of tweaks in a short time with minimal downtime is what makes microservices a hit for enterprises. There’s no need to set up an environment for each application, consisting of networking and software stacks. Developers can execute automated tests on every code commit. This further guarantees the reliability of each release without hampering the overall performance.
- Reduced Latency: Because of its asynchronous nature, irrespective of the number of services involved in performing a task, microservices enable faster response time, thereby reducing latency. Google even recommends using Cloud Trace (a distributed tracing system), which helps visualize the latency data and diagnose latency-related issues by mapping all API calls to their respective origins.
- Containers: Another great advantage of microservices is the capability to implement services as containers (moveable, single-purpose containers). For instance, Docker provides a standard containerization service for Linux. This makes it possible for users to create, deploy, and manage containerized applications uniformly across various platforms. The use of containers in microservices-based architecture also means that users can automatically deploy multiple environments with ease.
Summing Up
Much like cloud computing, the rise of microservices is deeply intertwined with major shifts in architecture and engineering practices – all predominantly inclining towards agile methodologies.
To that end, it’s safe to say that microservices-based cloud applications are the future of development. And, why wouldn’t they be? They’re better in every way!
Need help with microservices? Let’s connect.
Original Source:- LinkedIn
