What are Microservices?
Microservices is an architectural solution to building applications. As an architecture system, microservices are distributed and loosely coupled, so one team modifications won’t destroy the whole app. The advantage of using microservices is that product teams can easily create new app modules to satisfy evolving customer needs.
Users can deploy microservices independently. A particular service can be updated and modified individually without rebuilding and redeploying the entire application. These microservices communicate with each other using well-defined APIs, and they do not need to share the same technology stack, libraries, or frameworks.
The architecture of microservices consists of a series of small, autonomous services. Each operation is self-contained and should have a single business capability.
What sets the architecture of microservices away from more conventional, monolithic approaches is how it cuts the app down into its core functions. Each function is called a service, which can be designed and deployed separately, ensuring that specific programs can function (and fail) without adversely affecting others. This allows you to accept the technology side of DevOps and make constant iteration and distribution (CI/CD) more smooth and feasible.
Some of the microservices in action are Amazon, Netflix, Uber, and Etsy.
Benefits of Microservices.
1. Microservices can improve the teams and routines by distributed growth. You may also create several microservices at the same time. This ensures that more developers are working on the same app simultaneously, resulting in less time spent on development.
2. Since microservices are deployed separately, it’s easier to handle bug fixes and release functionality. You can upgrade the service without redeploying the whole program, and you can roll back the update if anything goes wrong.
3. As implementation cycles are becoming shorter, microservices' architecture facilitates more agile implementation and improvements.
4. As the demand for specific services increases, you can scale through several servers and infrastructure to fulfill your needs.
5. Teams should select the technology that best suits their service, using a combination of technology stacks as appropriate.
6. In a monolithic program, there is potential overtime for system dependencies to get tangled. Implementing a new function involves touching code in several ways. By not exchanging code or data warehouses, the architecture of microservices minimizes dependency, making it easy to implement new functionality.
Challenges
Here are some of the challenges that you need to consider before jumping on a microservices architecture:
1. Complexity: The implementation of microservices requires more moving parts than the corresponding monolithic application. Each service is more straightforward, but the structure as a whole is more complicated.
2. Testing: Integration testing and end-to-end testing can become more complicated and, at the same time, more crucial. Testing service dependencies is often tricky, particularly when the functionality is changing rapidly. Existing tools are not always useful to work with service dependencies.
3. Lack of Governance: The decentralized approach has its perks but can also cause problems. You can end up with so many different languages and frameworks, and then the application becomes hard to maintain. It could be helpful to set up specific project-wide guidelines without excessively compromising the versatility of the teams. This refers, in particular, to cross-cutting tasks such as logging.
4. Data Integrity: Data inconsistency can be a challenge because each microservice is responsible for its data persistence. Maintain consistency where possible.
5. Logging: With distributed systems, it will be impossible to manage the scale. So, to bring everything together, it would be best to have centralized logs.
6. Versioning: When upgrading to newer versions, bear in mind that you may be able to break down backward compatibility. You can draw on conditional logic to tackle this, but that’s going to be unwieldy and ugly, quick. Multiple services may be modified at any time, but you can have backward or forward compatibility issues without proper design.
7. Skillset: Microservices are very distributed networks. So, carefully determine if the staff has the expertise and experience to be successful.
General Guidelines
1. Model your services around the primary business domain.
2. Avoid centralization. Make individual teams responsible for designing and building services. Avoid code sharing or sharing of data schemas.
3. Each service should have personal data storage, and it should be the best.
4. Services interact via well-designed APIs. Avoid leaking information about the implementation. The APIs should be modeling the environment, not the internal execution of the service.
5. Offload cross-cutting problems, such as authentication and SSL termination, to the gateway.
6. The gateway should manage and route client requests with no understanding of business rules or domain logic.
7. Use stability techniques to avoid cascading disruptions in the operation.
