Jul 23, 2016
Cloud infrastructure in our modern tech world — Microservices
The term ”Microservice Architecture” is a buzzword which has sprung up over the last few years to describe a particular way of developing software applications as a suite of independently deployable, small, modular services in which each service runs a unique process and communicates through a well-defined, lightweight mechanism to serve a business goal.While there is no precise definition of this architectural style, there are certain common characteristics around organization and around business capability, automated deployment, intelligence in the endpoints, and decentralized control of languages and data.
Microservices are a more concrete and modern interpretation of service-oriented architectures (SOA) used to build distributed software systems. Like in SOA, services in a microservice architecture are processes that communicate with each other over the network in order to fulfil a goal.
To understand microservices, it’s important to first understand traditional software models. Developers wrote traditional applications as a single, cohesive unit where every feature and function is contained within the same executable, dynamic link library or another active codebase. They would then provision a virtual machine or cloud instance with enough CPU and memory to operate the application. Then, the application is loaded onto the instance and started. This process works fine for many simple tasks.
But the problem especially with enterprise-class, client-server applications — is that traditional application capabilities are finite. Developers design that software to provide only a limited amount of resources, such as simultaneous client connections. As the application encounters a processing, memory, I/O or other limit, its performance starts to decline and, in extreme cases, may crash. To work around bottlenecks, organizations need to provision and install another iteration of the application. This reduces the data centre resources available for other tasks.
Think of traditional software design like building a house. The house is designed to hold a limited number of people and provide a finite number of services. Once you encounter a persistent bottleneck, you need a bigger house.
A microservices architecture offers a scalable application design that uses resources more efficiently, and requires less overall compute power. In addition, microservices are an ideal complement to cloud services, such as event-driven and containerized computing. Netflix, eBay, Amazon, Twitter, PayPal, and many other large-scale websites and applications have all evolved from monolithic to microservices architecture.
Microservices-based architectures can provide greater flexibility to IT organizations and developers.
The benefits of implementing this service include A microservice can be developed by a fairly small team. Code for different services can be written in different languages (though many practitioners discourage it). Easy integration and automatic deployment (using open-source continuous integration tools such as Jenkins, Hudson, etc.).
Easy to understand and modify for developers, thus can help a new team member become productive quickly. The developers can make use of the latest technologies. The code is organized around business capabilities. Starts the web container more quickly, so the deployment is also faster. When change is required in a certain part of the application, only the related service can be modified and redeployed — no need to modify and redeploy the entire application.
And important thing is a better fault isolation: if one microservice fails, the other will continue to work (although one problematic area of a monolith application can jeopardize the entire system). Easy to scale and integrate with third-party services. No long-term commitment to technology stack.
