Why Microservices is the Future of Software

Source – readitquik.com

The latest in software application development is the rise of microservices, wherein applications are offered as a bundle of loosely coupled services. First coined in 2011, this term is now doing the rounds of popular technology circles. According to a survey by Nginx, 36% of enterprises are currently using microservices. Another 26% are in the research phase as far as this new technology is concerned. Organizations are divided between whether they should adopt a microservices approach or not. Here we talk about the prime advantages that it poses, so it can help you decide if microservices is the right thing for you.
Microservices enables companies to adopt a high degree of modularity in its software offerings. Because of this, the application protocols are lightweight—easier to develop, test, deploy, change, and maintain.

1. Better resilience: Because the entire application components are decentralized into separate entities, a failure in the code of one component seldom spirals over to another component. This is a welcome change from traditional software architectures, where fixing a malfunctioning code would require skimming through the entire code, trying to figure out the linkages. A microservice approach thus creates better resilience, providing a better user experience.
2. Better scalability: Each service being a separate component, a single service can be scaled up easily without impacting the other application components. This is a key advantage in an age where growth can happen anytime and to any order. To make all mission critical modules scalable, they can be deployed on multiple servers at once.
3. Tool flexibility: With a microservices approach, you can use specific tools for specific tasks, whichever works best, because the modules are essentially separate and independent. You are, therefore, not stuck with the problem of depending on a single vendor, as is the case with traditional architectures. While each service can utilize its own language or code, it can “talk” to the others effectively. This provides a high level of flexibility in development.
4. Better Time to market: As a host of loosely coupled services, it is very easy to modify or add new features; the entire code need not be revamped to make this happen. The developer can make changes to one specific service, resulting in smaller development cycles, and better time to market.
5. Easier maintenance: Because of the disparate nature and smaller size of the modules, microservices applications are easier to maintain and make changes to.
6. Better resource optimization: Microservice applications can be improved by having different teams developing and testing different modules. As a result, it is not necessary to put together a single team—small, agile teams work best for this approach, making resource allocation better optimized. Also, there is no need to rely on heavy and expensive machines. Even the bare basic x86 machines work well for microservice applications development. This saves a lot of costs in resources, both people and machines, and proves more ROI-friendly.
7. Suits continuous delivery: A microservice approach is best for businesses who want to deliver in an agile and continuous manner. This is because it involves the use of cross-functional teams (developers, testers, deployers, etc.), which work parallelly on a continuous delivery model. This approach of incremental and continuous development aids continuous delivery, making the service provider more market-ready.

Of course, microservice development is not for every software business. To be successful at it, you must have the resources for rapid app development and deployment, and monitoring mechanisms to keep various module on track. More than anything else, it is about adopting an agile DevOps culture and making sure everyone in the team adheres to it.