Do We Really Want to Move on Microservices❓
Before taking a decision on applicability of microservices with your organization, you need to carefully think what we have now and where would we should go. In order to make that decision Software Architect has to play a major role in decision making process.
Monolithic Applications
- Monolithic applications in the sense, it has one executable file for entire application.
- The most IT systems used to have monolithic architecture with their systems before emerging microservice applications or architecture.
- But, monolithic application itself consume some drawbacks as well. Let’s discuss them one by one in below.
👎Drawbacks of Monolithic applications
😞Even do you need to execute a single and simple change with you application (such as text color, background color changes and so on), may need to perform testing for each and every module to ensure its performances. Sometime, may need to go offline of your entire application.
😞It is no easy to find the issues since software application maintains huge code base.
😞When the application has become huge, will need more time to start and execute entire system.
😞Low scalability.
😞Not easy to adopt with the new technologies.
- But there are benefits as well.
👍Benefits of Monolithic Application
😃It is east to perform integration test when needed.
😃Since you know the exact path for services, easy to monitor them.
😃Can develop and deploy easily.
However to address the many problems regarding with the Monolithic applications, now we have the Microservices.
In Microservice architecture, the entire application is decompose in to small and independent services by based on their business logic. That means microservices encourage loose coupling concept. For an example, each service can have their own database instead of having a single database schema.
As well, while we developing microservice architecture based application, always remind that it should be a domain specific development application. Then only it could provide what exactly means to do by microservice. For an example, we are building an application for employee management system for a organization. Then it can have different modules like Personal Details, HR, Accounting and Finance, Leave Information System, Personal Resource Management and so on. Then details of same employee may used by each systems with different perspective. So, while developing an application for this organization we need to analyze how this same employee’s details will behave in each domain.
Let’s discuss more characteristics about the microservices.
- The services in microservice architecture have their own scope.
- The services in microservice architecture should run their own processes.
- The services in microservice architecture can communicate with the light-weighted protocols.
- Decentralized control.
- High scalability and easy to deploy.
- Should be able to maintain within small people group.
The Scalability is one of valuable characteristics provided by the microservices. Therefore, it will be really worthy to discuss about this more. Martin L. Abbot and Michael T. Fisher has discussed about the scalability of microservices through 3 axis in the book of “Art of Scalability”.
Let’s discuss more about how they mentioned about the scalability through 3 axis.
- As you can see, an application should be capable of to deploy as X-axis.
- Through Z-axis, it should be able to shading. For an instance, decompose the large databases into small chunks or shards to deploy across multiple servers.
- Through Y-axis, the application should be facilitated with functionality decomposition.
- As well, each services should be able to individually scalable.
How to Create a Microservice Architecture-Based Application
⭐️Select a proper language(s), tools, framework and required technologies to implement your application.
⭐️Always follow domain driven design path while designing your system.
⭐️Implement service resilience and fault-tolerance.
⭐️Restructure your team with all fellows like Developers, Architects, Business Analysts, UI/UX Engineers, QA Engineers and so on.
⭐️Always align with the precious requirements as users require.
😍 Pros of Microservices
- Easy to understand and diagnose the problems.
- Scalability.
- Easy to migrate in to different languages.
😥Cons of Microservices
- Distributed complexity.
- Hard to monitor and test.
- Need to ensure always each and every service is contributing to run the application.
So, I hope you all can gain a proper and completed understand about the characteristics, pros and cons on both monolithic and microservice applications. Then you will able to decide to we really need to approach this path on behalf of our own systems or our customer’s systems. In my next article we are going to discuss about the Best Practices bind with Microservice applications. Until then,
