Microservices: Detailed Guide

According to recent research by DZone, around 63% of companies use microservices architectures. Companies were using Monolithic architecture, but they moved to Microservices with advancements in apps and the internet.

Let’s discuss everything about Microservices architecture and its pros and cons:

What are Microservices?

Microservices architecture is a specific method of designing software systems. It structures a single application as a collection of loosely coupled services. It is easier to build applications that break down into small pieces that work together. Microservices are more about applying a certain number of principles and architectural patterns. Each of these microservices lives independently but also relies on each other. All these microservices deploy in production at their own pace, on-premise, or on the cloud.

Big companies like Facebook, Google, Netflix, etc., use it to power their applications. Going further, let’s see the Microservices architecture.

Microservices Architecture:

Microservices provides fine-grained services and lightweight protocols to follow. It has plenty of other things except the Microservices themselves.

• Identity Provider:Manages the identity information and provides authentication services within a distributed network.
• Service Discovery:It is used to keep track of services, service addresses, and endpoints.
• Static Content:It stores static resources like pages and web content.
• Content Delivery Network (CDN):It serves static resources like web pages, web content, etc., in distributed networks.
• API Gateway:It serves as the client’s entry point and is a single point of contact for the client. In turn it returns aggregated responses from underlying microservices.
• Management:It is used to maintain the nodes of services.

Microservices architecture is used to build applications and each of these has certain characteristics. They are:

• It fragments into many modular, loosely coupled components, and each of them performs discrete functions.
• These individual functions are useful to align with business capabilities.
• You can distribute these apps among the cloud and data centers.
• You can treat each function as an independent service that you can change, update, and delete without disrupting other applications.

Microservices Vs. Monolithic

What is Monolithic Architecture?

A single unit is used to build monolithic architecture. To build enterprise applications, there are three parts:

• Database: consisting of many tables usually in relational database management systems.
• Client-side user interface: consists of HTML pages or a JavaScript running in a browser.
• Server-side application: it will handle HTTP requests, execute domain-specific logic, retrieve and update data from the database, and use the HTML views which it sends to the browser.

It is a single logical executable service. To make any changes in the system the developer needs to build and deploy an updated version of the server-side application.

With monolithic service, there are certain drawbacks:

• It has limited reuse across monolithic applications.
• Scaling monolithic applications is challenging.
• You can develop it using only a single development stack.

What is Microservice:

Whereas, as discussed above, Microservices is a collection of loosely coupled services. They are easier to build applications that break down into small pieces and work together. The following things set Microservices apart from Monolithic services:

• Services are small, ideally built by a handful of developers.
• Other applications and services can consume and reuse them via language bindings and other shared libraries.
• Services exist as independent deployment artifacts and can scale independently.

People are opting for the latter one when it comes to constant comparison between monolithic and microservices. If you are thinking of developing an application, then the following are major benefits and drawbacks of Microservices:

Advantages of Microservices:

Independent Development:

Microservices assigns to the single development team to maintain it and developer can work independently. Small teams can work in parallel and iterate faster than larger teams. When a single service does not work better, the smaller team can also scale the services independently without needing to wait for a larger and complex team.

Isolation and Resilience:

Suppose one of the components fails due to outdated technology or the inability to develop the code further. In that case, developers can easily spin up another component while the rest of the application can function independently. This gives developers the freedom to develop and deploy services as and when needed, without waiting on decisions about the entire application.

Scalability:

Microservices are made of small components and can take up fewer resources so they are easy to scale to meet the increasing demand for that specific component. Microservices can function even when there are large changes in size and volume, which makes it ideal for enterprise applications that are using a wide range of platforms and services.

Autonomous Development:

Compared to monolithic architecture, individual components are easy to fit into continuous delivery. Only pinpointed service needs modification and redeployment when a change comes. If a service fails, others will continue to function independently.

There are two major benefits:

• It enables scaling and development.
• Does not need much coordination between teams.

Disadvantages of Microservices:

Increased Complexity:

Microservices are complex and challenging to learn compared to monolithic architectures. It is difficult to build new solutions and is faulty as many engineers are not that familiar with it. It is not the best solution for all applications, so you will have to understand the business requirements and make necessary changes.

Expensive:

They are costly and run in their own environments with their own CPUs. They work with all API calls which are costly. Additionally, the development environment is complex and requires a team of experienced developers. As a result, it has costly development.

Handling Data:

Handling data requests is one of the most difficult challenges with Microservices as it spans multiple services and requires constant updates to the data.

Whereas, in Monolith you can rely on ACID transactions to roll back a database change if something goes wrong. With microservices, there is much more complexity involved as it uses distributed transactions across various services.

Conclusion:

Between the constant fight of Monolithic and Microservices, the latter is better. Microservices architecture brings some major advantages as it makes it easy to develop an application. If you plan to develop an application and want to know which architecture to follow, Microservices is your answer.

Despite the complex structure, it has changed the way we develop applications. But, to develop an application using Microservices, you will need an expert who can help you with development. Hire asp.net developers from us who can help you with app development. Our expert team of developers will understand your requirements and help you to fulfill them.

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