Explore what microservices are made of and how they can improve business

Delve into one of the tech trends that’s increasingly being used by organizations, the benefits it brings to businesses, and the keys to successfully implementing this architecture. 

Lots of things are being said about microservices. Lots of things are being done with microservices too. Between 75% and 85% of organizations that have +1,000 employees around the globe are utilizing them to get some extra benefits from technology. Plus, between 2022 and 2023, 53% of those who haven’t adopted microservices yet said they are likely to do so. 

This architecture offers independent deployment, individual scalability, and improved business agility. But what are microservices about? Why is implementing them key for organizations? What should companies consider when deciding the adoption? Let’s explore these and more answers to frequent doubts around microservices architecture together.

When thinking about microservices, we must consider a cloud-native architecture approach that divides an application into multiple components or services. With an application made of small services instead of a single large unit, many benefits are unlocked.

Let’s delve into microservices a little more. IT teams can develop this architecture in any programming language; each microservice can have its way of processing, communicating, and completing tasks. Suppose we compare this decomposition against the legacy monolith application. In that case, the main difference we’ll see is the benefit of scaling and managing different languages without changing the whole environment.

In the monolith architecture, engineers must be aligned to utilize one single language with a single runtime, and when wanting to scale, they have to scale everything: the app development and deployment are tied to each other. While, as we have discussed, microservices offer independent deployment since they function as individual components or services that communicate through networks like API calls.

Thus, microservices empower teams with faster deployment and enhanced app reliability to stay up to date with the evolving tech ecosystem. They are enabled to adopt new improvements one service at a time, without needing to adjust all app components to do so. Therefore they can prevent environmental disruptions while reducing downtime and paving the way for obtaining faster applications. 

There are many key components microservices architectures have. We’re going to explore the five that we consider more valuable to understand what this architecture is about. 

The first one is basically the power to divide an app into services we talked about previously, and the independent deployment and redeployment this allows. The second is connected with how this componentization by services enables each team to focus on creating products to deliver individual services and organize those products around business capabilities and priorities.

By now, we should have noticed that we’ve been talking about products and not projects; that’s a third key component. The product model helps IT people manage the full life-cycle of their products instead of relying on, for example, maintenance organizations once they’ve completed the development process. 

Another key component is decentralized governance. A microservice architecture has this by default and this is connected to the chance of using different languages when deploying and designing the app. This helps engineers embrace the language that better fits into what they need to achieve instead of being forced to utilize one because the rest of the app uses it. One more point about decentralizing: data management can be individual too; each component has the power to manage its own database.

Plus, organizations that choose this kind of architecture will see a major reduction in developers’ workloads. Microservices can boost deployment efficiency by offering infrastructure automation. 

Microservice architectures not only ease the work for engineers but also deliver greater benefits to the entire organization itself. When building apps that run on this kind of architecture, companies can enjoy:

• Fault isolation for enhanced reliability. In microservices, when a component fails the failure stays in that component in order not to affect the whole app. This is the opposite of what happens with a monolith app. 
• Improved and real-time scalability scalation. Implementing a microservice architecture enables boosted scalability. On one side this means that developers can scale to meet business demands component by component without affecting the whole ecosystem. On the other side, this can be translated to a better response during peak hours because it enables auto-scalability when it’s needed and going back to where it was when it’s not. This saves costs and delivers an enhanced customer experience. It’s important to consider that organizations aren’t forced to redeploy when scaling.
• More agility to speed up innovation. Companies can embrace and update components more easily and faster and the app can still function when they’re working on that. This helps organizations streamline their apps and be up to date with the latest improvements.
• Strengthened stability. The stability is guaranteed by the power of microservices to be divided and updated one by one, lowering downtime and even costs because no overall infrastructure is needed. Downtime reduction also supports a better customer experience.

Implementing microservices can be challenging for organizations. There are certain must-do’s that they should follow when adopting them. Although this may sound contradictory, microservices shouldn’t be the first thing that comes to your mind when starting to create an adoption plan. The first thing should be to ask yourself if they really need them by answering questions like: Is the monolith app getting too complex? Is it complicating the way we manage our app? If the answer is yes, then you can start thinking about breaking out the app into smaller pieces.

When doing so, there’s a common doubt that may arise around the size of those pieces. Actually, size isn’t what’s important here. Dividing components should be a matter of making them autonomous for development, deployment, and scalability. But don’t make them too small, because if so they might lose that power by having too much dependency on other microservices. So, it’s critical not to take the internal cohesion and independence out of our sight. 

One last piece of advice is connected with DevOps and cloud services. It is highly recommended that companies implement microservices with one of these two approaches. Implementing this architecture without them can complicate the process because they’ll be trying to do so without proper development or cloud support to manage a heterogeneous —or divided— infrastructure. 

Now that you know the keys to using microservices in business, let’s get into more tech trends. Explore them in our blog.