In today's cloud era, you may have heard the buzzword cloud-native services everywhere, and you might think that what does it really means? Why it got so much popularity? One of the major cloud-native services is Microservices. Microservices are a software development technique—a variant of the service-oriented architecture (SOA) architectural style that structures an application as a collection of loosely coupled services. In a microservices architecture, services are fine-grained and the protocols are lightweight.
Unlike monolithic applications, Microservices architecture involves the breaking down the application into smaller one and they are interconnected.
1. Well organized:
Microservices architecture is well organized when compared to monolithic. Each microservice applications are assigned with a specific task and they are not worried about the task of the other components.
2. Easily understandable:
Monoliths have single massive code base since all components are grouped together into a single unit. But it makes complicated to developers to understand the code easily. But this issue is not so common in microservices because of its well-organized structure.
3. Decoupled:
Decoupled services are also easier to recompose and reconfigure to serve the purposes of different apps. They also allow for fast, independent delivery of individual parts within a larger, integrated system.
In monolithic, extremely difficult to change technology or language or framework because everything is tightly coupled and depend upon each other.
4. Independent Deployments:
Monolithic architecture is composed many tasks into a single unit, so when the developer wants to make any changes or update the existing code base then they need to build and deploy the entire code base at once. But in the case of microservices, the services offered by them can be deployed independently. A team can update an existing service without rebuilding and redeploying the entire system.
5. Service Communication:
Services communicate with each other through protocols. Internal implementation details of each service are hidden from other services. Services are responsible for persisting their own data or external state. It enables each service to be developed independently by a team that is focused on that service.
6. Microservice at scalable:
Monoliths deployed as a single unit, even though it is performed well, but was not quite as efficient in scaling. The reason behind this is the unbalanced load on components. However, a major drawback over here is that it results in several remote call overheads for accessing a single function. In microservices, each service like development, test, and production can be scaled independently and overcomes scaling problems of monolithic.
7. Performance:
In monolithic, Integrated development environment (IDE) is overloaded and slow because of the large code based architecture this leads to an increase in the build time of the application. This effect the performance of the system. Performance of microservices is comparatively good because It is easy to separate hot-listed services and scale them independently of the rest of the app.
8. Microservices over any cloud / bare metal provider:
Microservices can be written in any programming language and can utilize diverse infrastructures. There are two ways to choose technology, firstly the manner in which microservices communicate (synchronous, asynchronous, etc.) and secondly which protocol they use (REST, messaging and so forth.). In view of the service prerequisites, we have to pick the communication mechanism and protocol.
9. Microservices Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD):
We can deploy multi-stage build with the help of CI/CD. It makes seamless deployment to Kubernetes.
10. Monitoring:
Monitoring is the most frequently discussed challenges related to microservices. Monitoring helps us to know various statistics like the number of processed requests, throughput, load, number of errors, etc., after gathering the metrics, we can monitor them using an application like Grafana, Prometheus or AWS Cloudwatch.
Refactoring monolithic to a microservices architecture:
You are working with the big monolith system, and you want to break it up as small different task called microservices in order to deploy the system easily and effectively.
Here are the few tips for refactoring monolithic to microservices:
Don’t refactor everything together .
Assume Monolith as a Black box with some API. create a separate service with API in order to create a link between them to interact.
While including new features, make isolated microservices with an API for every one of them and make them cooperate with The Monolith's APIs
Gradually you will notice that every piece of your Monolith are being accessed only through your new APIs, even though they are still a part of the monolith code base.
when you see limited contexts rise up, it might be helpful to slash them of the Monolith and make them working as independent services.
With microservices, you are supposed to be much more automation than earlier. Think in advance about Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD), containers & repository, central logging, and monitoring.
Summary
Microservice architecture is a collection of tasks. They are highly maintainable, testable, loosely coupled and independently deployable. These are all qualities made it more popular than monolithic architecture, which is on the other hand where all the code base of the entire application is populated at a single application. Monolithic application found more disadvantage when compared to microservices.
For more details about cloud-native microservices & cloud-native stack transformation, please refer Yobitel Communications.
Please refer more for Six Important Facts to Prefer Codefresh for Microservices CI/CD Automation
