Imagine this: your business is booming, with an expanding customer base and many new and shiny features added to your application. But lately, things have been rough. Your app often crashes, leading to many late-night emergencies for your team and many disgruntled and unhappy customers. Think about the business loss…
Your developers want to fix the problem. In fact, they want to do a lot of things, but they are too focused on bug fixing and putting out fires to have time for anything else. It is hard to keep morale up when team members are leaving and burning out. The monolithic structure of your application is suffocating any innovative progress. Bug fixes are slow, new features take forever to implement, and the codebase is a tangled mess – you have completely lost track of who owns what and who is doing what. Adding more developers also doesn’t help because the learning curve is too steep.
If this story sounds familiar, you are not alone. Many enterprises, overtime, have created large, monolithic applications that try to do it all. But these applications have grown so complex and unwieldy that they are a nightmare to manage. That’s why many IT teams have re-architected application development with microservices. In this guide, we will delve into what microservices are, what they do, and how microservices, when combined with platform engineering, can achieve significant results in application delivery.
What are microservices?
Unlike traditional monolithic architectures, where all the functionalities are tightly intertwined and integrated into a single application, microservices break down the delivery of applications into smaller, more manageable and independent pieces. Each of these service components can be developed, deployed and scaled independently. That means, updates can be made separately without having to redeploy the entire application. This separation shortens time-to-market and makes fault isolation much more achievable. You can easily identify and resolve issues as they arrive and also scale up your operations more swiftly according to business needs.
Key components of microservice architecture
If running an application with microservices was like running a restaurant, then
- Microservices are like different kitchen stations: each station is an independent microservice, responsible for one function (appetizer, main course, dessert, etc). Each station has its own staff (developers) and follows its own recipe (code);
- API Gateway is the waiter: the waiter takes the customer’s order (client request on the application) and directs it to the right kitchen station(microservice);
- Independent cooking: each station(microservice) goes on to do what it does best independently, whether it’s about registration, payment options, product catalog, or more;
- Load balancing as additional cooks: if one station gets slammed (too many dessert orders), the head chef (load balancer) assigns additional help (more instances of the service) to handle the rushed orders;
- Circuit Breaker as polite floor manager: if the restaurant is short of ingredients (service failures), the polite floor manager(circuit breaker) would communicate with the customer and offer an alternative (fallback option) or a retry later.
Why are microservices so important: 6 key benefits
Microservices can offer significant benefits for application development, deployment and maintenance. Here are some of the key advantages to consider:
Higher fault resilience
Simply put, in a microservice architecture, even when one component fails, it does not bring down the entire application. For example, in an online banking application, when the account balance microservice malfunctions, app users can still make transactions without any disruption. This isolation enhances fault tolerance and ensures system stability. Failures can usually be contained and managed quite simply, without widespread damages.
Quicker time-to-market
Microservice architecture encourages teams to stay small, focused and agile. These small and focused teams can work on different microservices simultaneously, which speeds up the development of features and deployment of any updates, thereby enabling quicker time-to-market. For instance, an e-commerce platform’s product management team can develop and deploy updates to the product catalog independently of the checkout team, allowing both to focus on innovating new ideas and features more quickly.
Easier to scale
As each microservice runs independently, it becomes easier for developers to add, remove, update or scale a microservice as needed. For example, during Black Friday or other similar seasonal buying periods, an e-commerce platform will have surging demands. More resources can be allocated to scale up microservices that deal with check-outs and payments. If the demand drops after the peak, the microservice can be scaled back, allowing the resources or computing power to be distributed to other areas.
Adapt to different languages and technologies
With microservices, developers can use different programming languages and technologies without interrupting the overall structure of the application development and deployment.
More deployment flexibility
As each microservice can be updated, tested and deployed independently and on its own schedule, your DevOps team can deliver updates with minimal downtime. Take a travel booking platform as an example, adding new airlines to the flight booking service does not require changes to the hotel booking or car rental services, which can avoid any unnecessary and prolonged application downtime.
Enhanced security
Microservices enable granular security control for enterprises, which is a huge advantage in the current market. Tailored security measures for each microservice give businesses detailed control over access and permissions. For example, in a banking app, the fraud detection team can be granted access controls to sensitive data, while the investment advisory team may use different, appropriately tailored security measures. This helps businesses manage security more effectively, reducing vulnerability and legal liability.
What are the challenges of a microservice architecture?
Microservices have provided a novel and convenient approach when it comes to application development and deployment. However, there are still some challenges associated with microservices.
1. Complex management
Managing multiple microservices can be complex due to the sheer number of services involved. As it’s very easy to opt for microservices for business functions, an enterprise may end up with more than dozens of microservices. Tracking the health, performance and dependencies of each service can become overwhelming without proper tools or processes in place.
2. Data management complications
Each microservice typically has its own database, which can lead to data inconsistency. Maintaining data consistency across various databases and ensuring that proper data synchronization can be proven to be a challenge in some cases.
3. Deployment and orchestration challenge
Deploying and orchestrating multiple microservices involves coordinating the development, scaling, management and communication between dozens of individual services. Though each microservice can be developed, tested and deployed independently, they still need to be able to work together seamlessly in production. Managing different environments, ensuring updates of one microservice do not affect the others, and keeping track of the status and workflow of each microservice can be difficult.
How can platform engineering mitigate the challenges of microservices?
Here are three ways how RE:FORM – a platform engineering tool – can help to mitigate the above-mentioned challenges of microservices:
1. Automation
Platform engineering heavily emphasizes automation in deployment, scaling and communication. By minimizing cognitive load associated with keeping track of all processes and app updates, platform engineering can help developers ensure that their apps are running in the desired state, with full upscaling potential and rollback or version controls.
2. Infrastructure
Platform engineering benefits application delivery by allowing for consistent provisioning and management of cloud infrastructures. It enables automated and repeatable deployments across various environments. While many platform engineering tools focus on either application or infrastructure deployment, RE:FORM optimizes end-to-end with an application-centric approach and combines application delivery with the capability to integrate with different infrastructures, e.g., Compute, Network & Security services.
3. Real-time performance monitoring
With a centralized portal and a customizable dashboard, RE:FORm visualizes data orchestration and deployment performance involving microservices in real-time. Your whole team will benefit from excellent visibility of the deployment workflows, deployment health and performance.
Accelerate Your DevOps and Application Delivery with RE:FORM
Microservices have continued to win the hearts of many developers and business leaders. But in order to provide your team with a more streamlined, efficient and cost-effective way to create, test, monitor, deploy and scale application delivery, you must combine with a powerful platform engineering tool.
RE:FORM helps enterprises accelerate DevOps workflow and optimize application delivery from start to finish. With just one central portal, you can enjoy standardized application development and deployment, easy “drag-and-drop” infrastructure integration capability and customizable analytics reports.
Whether you have a team of 20 or 20,000, RE:FORM offers a highly scalable and secure platform engineering solution that can triple your DevOps efficiency without compromising security and governance or increasing headcounts.
Contact us now to see how RE:FORM can help your business thrive in the age of digital transformation.
