Why Should I Start Thinking About Using Microservices?

Many companies still use software with monolithic architectures in their backend. Having such an architecture can derive at having a hard time scaling fast enough.  The market requires agile software changes, quick delivery, and the correct structure to support this. As a result, several companies are not keeping up with the market IT needs. That’s why you should start thinking about using Microservices; to stay competitive.

For example, let’s say that your dev team works at a bank. Then, the consumer department requests to deliver an online survey. If you come back saying your devs need a month to deploy this simple change, then you probably need to change to using Microservices.

Market needs

The fact is monolithic architecture does not promote short release times for modern applications. Moreover, many of the devices are mobile now, and it is not just desktops or laptops as it was a few years back. Additionally, the market considers as its stakeholders not only lines of business (LOB) but also the application end-users.

Take a look at these numbers. By 2020, the world will have:

  • Four billion connected people
  • Twenty five+ million apps usage
  • Fifty-two hundred GB of data for every person

To start thinking about using microservices is just the beginning of being able to cope with those data usage numbers. Please read on to find out about some key concepts and more benefits.

Monolithic vs. Microservices

The term monolithic means it is a centralized model used to create applications tied to a single codebase. The code has to be updated whenever your devs try to add a new feature. As a result, it cannot scale to a specific service without scaling up the whole thing, thus leading to huge costs.

In contrast, Microservices break down applications into smaller processes that work separately from each other. This approach allows expanded modularity, making applications easier to develop, deploy, and maintain.

Scaling Applications

Many companies struggle to know upfront what array of devices they will support, thus have scaling problems. Microservices are great for scaling because it provides these principles:

  • Responsiveness
  • Resiliency
  • Elasticity

Microservices can make applications device agnostic. Hence, they enable the development that provides a consistent UX. Many of the major companies using IT have already adopted Microservices. They and are enjoying scalable software systems that allow them to offer a great UX. For instance, names such as PayPal, Amazon, eBay, Walmart, and Twitter, to name a few.

Five Advantages of Microservices

In general, there are five main advantages from a business standpoint:

  1. Enhanced Resiliency
  2. Faster time to market
  3. Increased Return On Investment (ROI)
  4. Reduced Total Cost Of Ownership (TCO)
  5. Continuous Delivery

With the improved resiliency and scalability, even if you bring down several blocks of your systems to introduce a new feature, your end-users won’t notice it. Since each service is a loosely-coupled component, you don’t have to scale the entire application. Furthermore, each service can use its language or framework while still being able to communicate with other parts of your program.

Going further, Continuous Delivery is a critical advantage to meet ROI and have a fast time to market. Not only downtime is reduced, but also infrastructure costs. By decoupling services, you don’t necessarily have to operate on expensive machines; even x86 machines can do the work.

Final Thoughts

In summary, even if your company is not the size of big companies, you can enjoy many benefits. Microservices can indeed help you keep up with the expectations of the market. Last but not least, the final aspects to take into account for a successful usage are: be equipped for quick provisioning, have robust monitoring, and to embrace DevOps culture.

Miguel Hernandez

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