Benefits of Microservices Architecture
In this tutorial, we are going to discuss the benefits of microservices architecture. Let’s elaborate on these benefits one by one.
Agility
One of the most important characteristics of microservices is that because the services are smaller and independently deployable, it’s easier to manage bug fixes and feature releases. You can update a service without redeploying the entire application, and roll-back an update if something goes wrong. In monolithic applications, if a bug is found in one part of the application, it can block the entire release process. So new features were waiting for a bug fix to be integrated, tested, and published.
Continuous delivery and deployment
This is a big plus, especially in the case of large, complex applications. Continuous delivery and deployment are two critical components of an effective software development process. And for microservices architectures, where apps work as suites of independently deployable services, they become particularly important. As the microservice architecture gives the project team the freedom to develop and deploy services separately from one another, the capabilities derived from continuous delivery and deployment help the team get any changes into production in a safe and sustainable manner. These practices are more easily implemented with the microservices-based than monolithic architecture. As a result, deliverable throughput and resource utilization are considerably improved.
Guaranteed up-time
With the right microservices architecture, it’s almost impossible for the whole system to go down. Since each microservice is built, deployed, and managed independently and is totally isolated at runtime so the whole system can never go down.
In case a microservices crashes, it will impact only its functionality, the rest of the system will behave normally. Also, microservices platforms like Kubernetes have high availability, load balancing, and autoscaling capabilities that scale each microservice independently in case of high load and certain thresholds are reached.
Small, focused teams
A microservice should be small enough that a single feature team can build, test, and deploy it. The microservices model enables an organization to create small, cross-functional teams around one service or a collection of services and have them operate in an agile fashion. Small team sizes increase agility. Large teams tend to be less productive, due to communication being slower and management overhead going up So that occurs the agility diminishes.
Small and Separated Code Base
In a monolithic application, The codebase is going to be so bigger over time for code dependencies to become tangled. Trying to add a new feature requires lots of refactoring on the existing codebase. Since microservices are not sharing code or data stores with other services, it minimizes dependencies, and that makes it easier to add new features.
Right tool for the job
In traditional layered architectures, an application typically shares a common stack, with a large relational database supporting the entire application. This approach has several challenges for example every component of an application must share a common stack, data model, and database even if there is a clear, better tool for the job for certain modules. It’s really frustrating for developers who are aware that a better, more efficient way to build these components is available. Also, developers are frustrated when the application stack is too old and can’t apply new best practices to their projects.
But in microservices architecture, small teams can pick the technology that best fits their microservice and uses a mix of technology stacks on their services. Because microservices are deployed independently and communicate over some combination of REST, event streaming, and message brokers. It’s possible for the stack of every individual service to be optimized for that service.
Technology changes all the time, development libraries and tools also evolving very fast so since an application is composed of multiple, smaller services, it is much easier and less expensive to evolve with more desirable technology into microservices.
Fault Isolation
Microservices’ loose coupling also builds with fault isolation and better resilience into applications. If one of your microservice becomes unavailable, it won’t affect the entire application. Of course, you should design your microservices are fault tolerance and handle faults correctly for example by implementing retry and circuit breaking patterns. Even failures happened, if you fix those failures without any business effect, your customer will always be happy.
Scalability
Microservices can be scaled independently, so you scale-out sub-services that require fewer resources, without scaling out the entire application. So we can say that microservices require less infrastructure than monolithic applications because they enable precise scaling of only the required services, instead of scaling the entire application.
Also scaling is very easy with using a container orchestrator tool like Kubernetes, you can pack a higher volume of services onto a single host, which allows for more efficient utilization of hardware resources.
Data isolation
Since microservices follow the database-per-service patterns, databases are separated from each other according to microservices design. So it gets easier to perform schema updates because only a single database is affected. In a monolithic application, schema updates can become very challenging, and risky.
As you can see that we have seen lots of Benefits of microservices, so now its time to see the challenges of microservices architecture.
Higher software testability
Loosely coupled services are tested independently, and thus application decomposition, so common in microservice ecosystems, can significantly increase the app testability. Although the process of testing and verification of microservice systems is far more complex and nuanced than the one of a traditional monolithic application, it can conform to the highest testability standards. An effective test strategy of a microservice-based application must take into account all the peculiarities of the architectural style. Then, if individual services are tested in isolation, and the overall system behavior is continually being verified, the testing coverage will be significantly increased.