Why your next software project should be Microservices-based?

What are Microservices?

There are multiple definitions of a microservice or microservice-based architecture. Rather than worrying too much about the technically highly accurate definition, I'll prefer to define it in simple terms.

Microservices based architecture is dividing a large software application into multiple, individual software modules & components and implementing them as independent services, which can be developed, deployed and managed independently. These services together form a solution/application by communicating with each other over a generic communication channel like internet.

Why use microservices-based architecture?

The microservices-based architecture offers multiple advantages against the traditional monolithic architecture. The following sections highlight the advantages of using microservices-based architecture from different perspectives and concerns of the software-development-lifecycle (SDLC).

Architecture:

Following are architectural advantages from the perspectives like Scalability, Maintainability and Extensibility.

• Highly loosely-coupled modules, implemented as individual microservices.
• High re-usability of the independent microservices, across multiple applications.
• Extreme separation of concerns.
• One is forced to define the API for individual microservices for intercommunication with other microservices. This has multiple advantages of its own.
• Well-defined and well-enforced boundaries between different microservices stops unexpected propagation of defect across different microservices. Thus, impact of a change in one microservice is minimal, if any, on other microservices.

Development:

Following are advantages from the perspective of efficient and faster development.

• Freedom to develop different microservice in different technology!
• One is free to use the technology that best suits the implementation of given functionality of given microservice. This makes the development faster and more efficient.
• Individual Development-Teams can choose the technology of their choosing as per their skillset and preference. This improves the productivity of the team.
• Porting to a new technology-stack is easier, one microservice at a time! This also makes it easy to try out new technology-stack by implementing it for just one (or a few) microservice. The remaining application (microservices) keep working on the older technology-stack, without any integration-issues.
• A good identification and isolation of individual microservices limit the domain-knowledge and business-logic that individual development-teams should possess.

Testability:

Following are advantages from the perspective of the ease of testing the application.

• Individual microservice can be tested individually.
• Testing performance of individual microservice is easier.
• Clear Request-Flow among the microservices makes it further easier to test the application.
• Overall separation of concerns makes it easier to test the application.

Project Management:

Following are advantages from the perspective of project-management.

• Independent Release-Cycles for different microservices.
• Smaller, hence, more manageable teams. Big team-sizes add to the overhead and challenges of the project-management. You remember the "two-pizza rule", don't you?
• Every microservice can be managed as an independent project, making it more manageable.
• Microservices are more DevOps friendly.
• Adding new developers to the team and helping them come up to speed is easier, faster and more efficient due to the limited functionality and domain-knowledge of individual microservices.

Operations:

• Easier to identify the bottlenecks.
• Scale-up only those microservices which need scaling! Now, think of scaling up only a few modules in a monolithic application!
• "One microservice down" is equivalent to "one feature unavailable"! It doesn't take your complete application down.
• High-Availability/Redundancy only for selected microservices is possible.
• Upgrading individual microservices without shutting down the complete application is possible.

Epilogue:

There are many more advantages and further details to it but I wanted to keep it short and concise to avoid overwhelming the readers with too many details, over a broad spectrum. I tried to cover the breadth without getting much into the depth to keep it simple but at the same time be able to intrigue the readers about the topic.

I also avoided too many technical-details to avoid making it a purely technical article only for the technical people.

About the author:

The author has 23+ years of experience in Software Industry with 15+ years as a CTO and Co-founder. As a CTO, the author had been keeping the technology-competency of the companies ahead of the curve by helping the companies with Technology-Strategy and Vision by studying, analyzing and predicting the future trends, if not thought-leading them.

The author is an expert in multiple enterprise technology stacks like .Net, Java and MEAN, having architected many enterprise-grade applications in different domains and industries, making them high-performing, highly-scalable, secure and user-friendly.

The author has 3+ years of experience in architecting and overseeing the development of highly-available and geo-redundant microservices-based, cloud-native enterprise applications, in a public, private and hybrid cloud.