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 with +1,000 employees worldwide are using them to gain additional 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 on adoption? Let’s explore these and other answers to common questions about 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 built from small services rather than 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 own 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 ability to scale and manage different languages without changing the whole environment.

In the monolith architecture, engineers must be aligned to use a single language and runtime, and when they want to scale, they have to scale everything: app development and deployment are tied together. As we have discussed, microservices offer independent deployment since they function as individual components or services that communicate through networks, such as API calls.

Thus, microservices empower teams with faster deployment and enhanced app reliability, helping them stay up to date with the evolving tech ecosystem. They are enabled to adopt new improvements one service at a time, without disrupting the entire platform, reducing downtime while accelerating innovation. This architectural approach has become a cornerstone of modern Website Development Services, where scalability, resilience, and continuous delivery are critical for long-term success.

There are many key components of microservices architectures. 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, as we talked about previously, and the independent deployment and redeployment that this allows. The second concerns how this service-based componentization enables each team to focus on creating products that deliver individual services and to 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 rather than relying on, for example, maintenance organizations once development is complete. 

Another key component is decentralized governance. A microservice architecture has this by default, and it is connected to the possibility of using different languages when designing and deploying the app. This helps engineers embrace the language that best fits what they need to achieve, rather than being forced to use one just 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 organization as a whole. 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 remains within that component to avoid affecting the whole app. This is the opposite of what happens with a monolith app. 
• Improved and real-time scalability. 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 hand, this can translate to a better response during peak hours because it enables auto-scalability when needed and reverts to its previous state 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. Stability is guaranteed by the ability of microservices to be scaled and updated individually, reducing downtime and 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-dos that they should follow when adopting them. Although this may sound contradictory, microservices shouldn’t be the first thing that comes to mind when you start creating 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, a common doubt may arise about the size of those pieces. Actually, size isn’t what’s important here. Dividing components should be about making them autonomous in development, deployment, and scalability. But don’t make them too small, because they might lose that power if they become overly dependent on other microservices. So, it’s critical not to lose sight of internal cohesion and independence. 

One last piece of advice concerns 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, as 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.