In today’s blog post, the microservices architecture concept, one of several styles to adopt, will be explored. We will also explain the characteristics and benefits of using this style when developing an app.

What are microservices?

Microservices are an architecture and organizational approach that allows you to divide a large application into small independent parts. A microservice architecture puts each element of functionality into a separate service.

Microservices architecture structures an application as a collection of services that are highly maintainable, meaning that makes developers work easier. Each service is a separate codebase, which can be managed by a small development team.

Also, microservices are loosely coupled and independent. These characteristics make them easier to test and deploy. Furthermore, this independence makes them great for specifically targeted business capabilities.

In a microservices architecture, services communicate with one another using well-defined APIs.

According to Google Cloud docs, containers can be considered a well-organized microservices architecture. Keep reading to know more about microservices characteristics.

Benefits of microservices

First and foremost, developers use microservice architecture to accelerate application development. As microservices are autonomous, each of its components can be developed, deployed, operated, and scaled without affecting the functioning of other services.

Because of its agility, microservice teams can update code more easily without touching or redeploying the entire application. It also makes it easier to debug and test applications.

Scalability is also one of the most relevant microservice characteristics to enhance. As we have said, each service is a separate component. So, teams can scale up a single function or service without scaling the entire application.

One of the benefits of having an application decentralized and decoupled into services is increasing its resistance to failure. It’s possible to handle a service failure without crashing the all application.

With microservices, teams avoid using the same tool for every single task. Developers can use different programming languages, frameworks, or ancillary services while still comfortably communicating with the other services within the application.

Challenges in microservices

Any action that requires log reading will be much more arduous. Either the login system is extremely advanced and can merge all microservices logs into an understandable file/ model, or the interesting part will have to go through lots of separate files.

Despite allowing different programming languages or frameworks for each service, they still have to be compatible if an interaction is required.

Keep in mind that to use microservices, the developers need senior experience. The construction of large applications following this type of architecture can easily become too complex for any newcomer developer. Not only because of the mentioned challenges, but also the lack of governance, possible network congestion and latency, and data integrity, which can amount to inefficient apps.

Who is using microservice architecture?

Some of the most known and influential companies in the market use microservice architectures. Starting with Netflix, the giant responsible for more than 14% of the internet traffic, is considered one of the pioneers in the world of microservices. Netflix uses microservices for maintenance and reliability. It also uses this style to monitor the popularity of movies and TV shows, gaining the advantage to produce shows people want to watch.

Amazon, which grew from a bookstore to the world's largest e-commerce platform, adopted microservice architecture to resolve all the bottlenecks caused by the company's growth. With this process, Amazon automated operational processes and allowed them to scale services depending on traffic and current business needs.

Almost everybody knows Uber. The company also migrated from a monolith application to a microservice architecture to keep up with the scale. Today, Uber uses microservices to manage all business processes.

With over 381 million active users worldwide and 172 million premium subscribers worldwide, Spotify turned to microservices to give “the application the ability to escalate quickly, deploying different services in different machines with personalized performance depending on the demand of each service”.

The American multinational e-commerce corporation eBay uses thousands of microservices to optimize its business operations and e-commerce.

Several other companies use microservices as a solution to their growth. As mentioned above, this type of architecture is ideal for scalability, agility, manageability, and delivery speed.

Keep in mind that you should choose the best solution for your project and not the most used or the one that’s a trend.

At Zalox, we can help you to understand the dimension and need of your project. Contact us.