Have you ever heard of the word Micro-service? This is not a general term that most people are aware of. But, it is increasingly used in the development world and gaining popularity for its incredible features. The Micro-service architecture has emerged from domain-driven design, continuous delivery, automation of the platform and infrastructure, scalable systems, polyglot programming and persistence.
It's been long since we have been designing and improving systems now. In these years, there have been various innovations, architectural trends, best practices and today, Micro-services have certainly changed this approach and stimulated growth and responses.
But what exactly Micro-service defines?
In very simple terms, Micro-services is an architecture that designs an application as a set of services. Both the architecture and the writing approach of software are Micro-services. Applications are divided into their smallest components with Micro-services, independent of each other.
Installing everything into one piece is a conventional, monolithic approach to applications that have created more and more complicated problems. Whereas, the Micro-services are isolated and work together to accomplish the same tasks but they have redefined the process, making it much easier. These elements and processes are Micro-services. This software development approach values granularity, lightweight and the ability to share common processes across many applications. This is an important component in the optimization of cloud-native application development.
Since 2011, Micro-services have been increasing exponentially among forward-thinking application development organizations. They are on the verge of being popular. According to a recent study, 36% of businesses using them now and another 26% are in the research process. But many still do not know why Micro-service architecture is so important and how it can help organizations.
If you want to know more about Micro-services, this article can surely help you to look closely at their importance and relative strengths and benefits.
Micro-services are the perfect framework for delivering software in a continuous fashion
Monolithic applications used to have dedicated teams working on separate functions like the user interface, database, server-side logic, and technical layers. When Micro-services arrived, they helped in employing cross-functional teams to manage an application's entire life cycle using a continuous delivery model. When developers, operations, and testing teams, all work on the same service at the same time, testing and debugging become simple and fast. Code is continually designed, reviewed, and implemented, with this incremental development strategy and you can reuse code from existing libraries rather than reinventing the wheel.
One of the key reasons for using micro-services according to 54% of businesses, is that it gives development teams more autonomy.
Micro-service architecture helps in increasing deployment speed and scalability
Micro-service optimizes deployment speed and application efficiency through the architecture by helping organizations to move at the market speed. Each application can be transported anywhere without altering its surroundings because it runs in its environment. Since every service is a separate part, a single feature or service may be measured without the requirement of the entire application. Business-critical services on multiple servers can be deployed for improved availability and efficiency without affecting other services' performance. Scalability is the main element of Micro-service. According to a survey, 64% of companies claim that adopting micro-services have improved the scalability of their application.
Micro-services will allow adjusting to changing business trends quicker
Micro-services allow fast updating and testing software, help to monitor market dynamics, and faster adaptation of products.
60% companies report that faster time to market new products and services is the main reason for implementing Micro-service architecture.
Micro-services give a lead in innovation as developers can test apps elsewhere without having to worry. Today's rapidly evolving market is helping to keep up with innovation while generating new sales.
Micro-services allow resource management and increase ROI
Many companies are experiencing rising infrastructure costs as a result of their existing architecture. In a monolithic architecture, any alteration to an application can be costly because every component of the monolith interacts with other parts, so a change in one position affects other things. This means that developers and operations experts will have to do a lot of testing to figure out the side effects of changes before they can implement them. The larger the monolith becomes as more updates are made, the more time and money are required to make potential adjustments. Therefore, Micro-services increase productivity, decrease maintenance costs while also reducing downtime.
Micro-services are seen as highly useful for developing next-generation services and applications by 73% of companies who are using or planning to use them.
Micro-services enhance resilience
The entire application is decentralized and decoupled into utilities that function as independent entities with Micro-services. Unlike a monolithic architecture, where a failure in the code affects several services or functions, a failure in a Micro-service architecture has a limited effect. If some devices are down for repair, the users will be unaffected. After implementing Micro-services, 50% of organizations saw an increase in application resilience.
When used correctly, Micro-services pay off!
It is important to know that when used in the right way, Micro-services are proven to be extremely effective. They enable to scale the application as the number of developers working on them increase. At the macro stage, the trick is to create applications without making them complex. That means one should keep track of the time a new service is added to the system or a new Micro-service link is made.
In a survey, Micro-service architectures are used by 63% of organizations that have claimed improved employee productivity and customer/end-user experience.
Advantages of Micro-service
The following are some of the most sought-after benefits of Micro-service architecture in an enterprise:
Each Micro-service can be created independently based on its specific features.
- Micro-service can be deployed in any framework.
- Even if one of the applications’ service fails, the device continues to run.
- Multiple languages and technologies may be used to create different services with the same framework using a mixed technology stack.
- Individual components can be scaled as needed; there is no need to scale all components at the same time.
- The smaller code base allow teams to grasp the code more quickly, making it easier to manage.
Conclusion
It’s high time for enterprises to adapt quickly to customer needs and changing conditions in today's market climate. Applications have to be deployed quickly and easily maintained. While much of this can still be handled in traditional architecture, there is a limit. At some point, a more dynamic and flexible solution may be crucial to the business's future.
The importance and advantages of Micro-service architecture vary significantly from conventional monolithic architecture. However, this modular architectural model is great, for a reason and presently more businesses realize the need to build their applications quicker, simpler and more agile through Micro-services.
A survey has also shown that 28% of a quarter of additional companies consider using Micro-services for future uses.
Micro-services keep the company on track with increasing growth and continuous delivery. Therefore, Micro-services are vital for businesses to achieve their objectives and provide faster growth, better software, better talent and lower cost. Although a monolithic architecture can take time, effort, and money to turn into an architecture for Micro-services, the wait can still be worthwhile!