Just as you have to scale your limits to maintain a healthy life, so is the case in software development.
A famous phrase by the Greek philosopher Aristotle—”the whole is more than the sum of its parts”—has long functioned as a framework in management philosophy. According to the concept, things work better in a unit than in pieces. Microservices architecture, on the other hand, turns this principle on its head by assuming that the sum of the pieces is greater than the whole.
Microservices architecture is a type of development architecture that offers well-defined frontiers for autonomous services, granular deployability, scaling, and maintainability.
In this blog, you will get a walkthrough of the implementation and challenges of microservices architecture. Furthermore, you will also get to know how it can assist in scalability.
What is Microservices Architecture all about?
Microservices architecture is a software design that includes breaking down an application into shorter, separate services. Each microservice is developed to perform a specific business function and is led by a different team.
Microservices are loosely coupled. Each service handles a dedicated function inside a large-scale application. For example, shopping carts, billing, user profiles, and push notifications can all be individual microservices.
These functional areas are sometimes called domains. Microservices communicate with each other via well-defined interfaces with small surface areas. The small surface areas limit the blast radius of failures and defects.
It makes each service area to reason about in the context of the entire application. Microservices communicate with one another over a combination of remote procedure calls (RPC), event streaming, or message brokers.
gRPC provides a faster response, but the blast radius to other microservices would be larger when the services were to go down. Event streaming provides better isolation between services but they take longer to process.
Points to consider while implementing Microservices Architecture.
The best practices to ensure the successful implementation of a microservices architecture are essential, even though they may provide significant benefits. The most important strategies for designing scalable systems based on a microservices architecture are as follows:
1. Determining the boundaries of your service
To effectively develop and implement a microservices architecture, it is crucial to identify the boundaries of your services. This process involves breaking down the monolithic application into distinct business features or capability components. Each feature represents an individual and independent service, contributing to a specific business function.
By identifying the boundaries of your services, you can precisely define the function and scope of each microservice. This organization allows for a more efficient arrangement of microservices based on business functions, data models, business rules, and data structures.
The establishment of boundaries is essential as it isolates the functions of the microservices, enabling developers to make changes and updates within one service without impacting the rest of the application. This level of separation ensures that services only interact with each other through clearly defined APIs, which are essentially contracts specifying the input and output messages of the services.
2. Consider continuous deployment while developing Microservices
Building microservices with continuous deployment in mind is crucial for achieving a thriving microservices architecture. Adopting the deployment approach, you guarantee the ability to implement small, frequent changes to your application without jeopardizing the entire system.
With continuous deployment, every modification to your microservices is automatically constructed, tested, and deployed to the production server without any human intervention. This empowers your teams to swiftly deliver new software features, updates, and alterations, significantly reducing the time it takes to implement changes.
Gone are the days of laborious manual deployment processes that could drag on for days or even weeks. Embrace continuous deployment and revolutionize your microservices development.
3. Make sure that each microservice can access its respective Databases
To achieve a successful implementation of the microservices architecture system, it is crucial to guarantee that every microservice has its dedicated database.
This approach is vital as it eliminates the risk of data inconsistencies that can arise from storing data in a single location. Furthermore, it prevents the entire application from collapsing in the event of a database failure.
Each microservice should possess its own data source, either integrated within the microservice itself or accessed through APIs. This “database per service” architecture allows for independent deployment and scaling of each service, ensuring optimal performance and the freedom for development teams to work on their respective microservice databases without any interference.
4. Uphold effective communication
Effective communication is the backbone of any successful microservices architecture system. Without it, microservices cannot function as distinct, standalone services that interact to deliver value. Therefore, maintaining efficient communication is a critical best practice that should be prioritized.
There are two essential parts to maintaining efficient communication in microservices. The first is service-to-service communication, which involves communication between different microservices. Each service is independently deployable, communicable, and interoperable without dependencies from other services. This form of communication is typically achieved through APIs and Service Oriented Architecture principles.
The second part is communication within the service. This is the internal communication between various components within a given microservice, which is as important as services communicating with each other. Efficient communication within the service is needed to ensure there is a flow of information within the service and that the service can respond to inputs from the user.
5. Use containerization
Containerization is an essential practice when developing a microservices architecture. By creating isolated environments, containers allow multiple applications to run simultaneously on a host, each managing its resources and dependencies.
Lightweight and portable, containers package the entire software stack and application code, enabling easy management and deployment across different environments without the need for virtual machines. The benefits of using containerization in a microservices architecture are numerous.
It ensures isolation, consistent environments, resource efficiency, easy deployment, scaling capabilities, and enhanced security. Embracing containerization is crucial for maximizing efficiency, reducing costs, and safeguarding your system against potential vulnerabilities.
Challenges to Consider in Microservices Architecture
Developing microservices architecture can be quite challenging, but developers need to address these challenges to fully harness the benefits it offers. Let’s take a look at some of the hurdles that come with building microservices architecture:
- Complexness of Design and Enactment
With microservices, you can achieve greater flexibility, scalability, and resilience in your applications. It allows you to break down your application into smaller, independent services that can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently. This means you can respond quickly to changing business needs and deliver new features faster. So, while the complexity of microservices may seem daunting, the rewards are well worth the effort.
- Data consistency
In this innovative system, each service has its independent data stores, which brings about a fascinating challenge – data redundancy. Let’s imagine a scenario where data for a specific transaction is kept in one service. Likely, this same data will also be stored in other services for various purposes like reporting, analytics, or archiving.
Now, here’s where things get interesting. Traditional data engineering techniques simply can’t handle the complex task of maintaining data relationships across multiple services. To achieve a consistent state, every microservice must complete its work, which often requires multiphase commits.
- Testing & Monitoring
Without the right tools, things can quickly spiral out of control. Imagine where there are countless services to monitor, each developed using different programming languages. And let’s not forget about the debugging process – with each service having its own set of logs, it becomes a daunting task to sift through a sea of unstructured data just to find the root cause of a failure.
In a microservices environment, the possibilities for runtime failures are endless – it could be the microservice itself, its container, or even the network connecting all the services. And when a failure occurs, it creates a web of complex intermediate states that are incredibly challenging to recover from.
- Security
Data distribution can be a real headache. Keeping user data confidential and intact is like trying to juggle flaming swords while riding a unicycle. Not only do organizations struggle with access controls and secure authentication for each service, but they also have to deal with the terrifying prospect of increased attack surface vulnerability.
If that is not enough, deploying microservices across multiple cloud environments adds an extra layer of risk. It’s like walking a tightrope blindfolded, with no control or visibility over your application components. Testing for vulnerabilities becomes a Herculean task, as each microservice communicates through different infrastructure layers.
- Inter-service communication breakdown
Microservices that have interdependencies necessitate effective communication through well-defined APIs while avoiding the need for shared technology stacks, libraries, or frameworks. To enable seamless resource sharing across multiple services, it becomes imperative to configure infrastructure layers.
The communication protocols between services must be explicitly specified, encompassing serialization, security measures, request options, error handling, and the expected response catalog. Inadequate configuration can result in heightened latency, thereby compromising system performance.
How can Microservices Architecture help you achieve scalability?
While traditional, monolithic architectures can struggle with scaling out, microservices architecture is optimally suited for it. In this section, we explain how microservice architecture boosts scalability.
- Independent services
Microservices architecture divides a large, monolithic application into smaller, independent services that can be deployed, scaled, maintained, and updated individually. This enables horizontal scaling, allowing new resources to be added when demand increases. By responding to specific requests from an application, each service can handle more requests across the system simultaneously.
- Isolation
The granular nature of microservices enables the isolation of each service, facilitating a simpler approach to resource allocation. A particular service that necessitates additional resources to manage a surge in demand can be selectively scaled up, while maintaining other services at their current level, thus avoiding resource underutilization or service lag time.
- Distributed by design
Microservices are innately engineered to operate seamlessly across distributed networks. By utilizing APIs for service communication, it becomes simpler to isolate code that is susceptible to sudden surges in demand and allocate resources more effectively as traffic fluctuates.
The communication between microservices facilitates the enhancement of message partitioning, enabling the allocation of workload among the services to be more streamlined.
- Ongoing deployment
In the microservices architecture, each microservice can be deployed independently of others through the implementation of DevOps practices. This enables cloud deployment for automated scaling of resources. The introduction of new microservices can be done without the need to shut down the entire system, thereby reducing downtimes and improving the overall system availability.
- Fault isolation
The implementation of service isolation results in an improved decoupling of services. Rather than relying on a single service as a point of failure, the system functions as a set of distinct services. In the event of a service failure, the remaining services can continue to operate, thereby ensuring a high level of availability and overall system stability.
Conclusions
Microservices architecture is the future of software product development. Its benefits are numerous, including modularity, scalability, and flexibility. With microservices, you can easily tackle the limitations of monolithic architecture by providing well-defined boundaries for autonomous services, independently deployable services, scaling, and maintainability. This makes it easier to manage complex systems.
However, it’s important to note that microservices architecture also comes with specific challenges. These include increased complexity, data inconsistency, testing, and more prominent security risks. But don’t let these challenges discourage you. By implementing best practices that comprise the maintenance of well-defined boundaries, continuous integration and delivery, and modularization, you can effectively reduce the problems associated with microservices architecture.
