5 benefits of using microservice architecture for your software system
Are you currently working on a software backend system that started out with a small set of features, and that is steadily growing too big to manage?
And managing this change is becoming more and more difficult?
What you might be working on is a monolith system, that is at risk of becoming too expensive to change if you continue down this path. And you are just on the verge of giving up?
If so, you might consider redesiging your system with a microservice architecture. This change comes at a cost, but is it worth it?
Here are the the top 5 benefits you can gain from implementing a microservice architecture:
- Microservices are more efficient to run on your server infrastructure.
When you run your software components as microservices, you are breaking up a whole system into smaller, more independent parts. You can allocate each part certain amount of resources according to your usage needs.
Run each part as a Docker container, a AWS Lambda function, or on one of the many cloud providers. All these are great tools to manage how powerful you want each microservice to be.
This not only gives you better allocation of limited resources that result in savings, lesser scheduled downtime, and better runtime scalability, but also reduce risk of capacity-related service outages.
2. You can replace components as you go.
Ahhh, the inevitable bug fix is here again. With microservices, it’s just a matter of applying a patch onto the target service and deploying to production again, while rest of the components keeps running.
And since it’s a microservice, you get faster deployments and shorter downtimes, providing high availability and resilience.
3. Scale your business for growth
As your business grows, you would want to add more features to support an ever-growing number of users.
When you have microservices, growing your software offerings can be a matter of enlarging the scope of one or more service, or adding more microservices.
Also, you can always scale the number of instances needed by each microservice. This is great when you encounter high demand for certain services during peak hours.
4. Move faster and be agile.
Since your system is now modularized, each module can be taken care of by smaller teams, that are independent and highly decoupled.
Modify, remove, or add code the other parts of the system, without experiencing the downtime of an entire system as if it was a monolith.
Each microservice is independent of the choice of programming language and framework used.
5. Iterate, test, repeat.
QAs can test each service without impacting the other parts of the system.
One notable strength of microservices for product owners and managers is the ability to perform market tests and validate product ideas with A/B testing.
A-B features can be implemented as separate microservices and deployed temporarily for a short period of time to perform new functions aimed at a targeted group of users.
After reviewing the outcomes from each test iteration, the results can be used for the next iteration. It is also possible to run multiple tests in parallel at each iteration!
That said, microservice is not for everyone!
Not every benefit mentioned here has to be harvested. Your software can still run fine without them.
Depending on the design of your microservice architecture, your software may not realize all of these benefits. Coming up with a well-designed microservice architecture that serves business and technical goals takes time and effort.
Running microservices incurs overhead costs. Be sure to evaluate if you really need a microservice architecture, when monolithic applications can run just as well in many circumstances.
Amazon has a great list of books on microservices. The most popular seems to be Sam Newman’s Building Microservices:
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