Transforming Enterprise Applications with Microservices
The business environment today endures a high degree of uncertainty in terms of market demands, consumer preferences, and geopolitical and economic conditions. Businesses often get very little time to adjust to disruptions.
A case in point is the pandemic. This period was a paradigm changer for most businesses as digital channels became imperative to serve customers and stay afloat. Even many businesses that had dabbled in digital options were struggling to meet varied and unprecedented demand and dynamics of consumer trends. The technologies employed by these businesses were not fully adaptable to the rapidly changing conditions and proved to be hard to pivot at short notice. In this environment, cloud computing made universal access to data, tools, and business processes possible while addressing cost efficiency and scalability. But enterprises needed still more flexibility and resilience in the different components that made up the large and complex enterprise application ecosystem.
Thus, emerged the case for a highly customizable and flexible technology architecture running on the cloud at the heart of every business.
The good news is that, if your business is amongst one of the many that are searching for such an accommodative technology ecosystem, the solution lies ready in the form of microservices architecture.
Studies show that the global market size for cloud microservices architecture will be worth USD 2.7 billion by 2026. It’s highly unlikely that enterprise tech leaders are yet to hear about microservices architecture since it has been around for quite a while, yet if there is still some ambiguity surrounding it, here is a quick check.
Microservices architecture is an application development approach wherein a large application is broken up to operate as a suite of smaller independent modular services or components. Each of these elements has its own runtime environments and databases encapsulated thereby providing it with an independent existence as well. The different services communicate via Application Programming Interface or APIs to realize the business objectives or capabilities of the larger application by working together.
What are the benefits that enterprises can enjoy with microservices architecture?
There are several benefits for enterprises to shift their application development strategies from following traditional monolithic architecture into one driven by microservices. Let us examine the top 4
Modular Flexibility
One of the biggest advantages that a microservices architecture offers is the ability to customize or modify individual services completely without disrupting the larger business application’s performance. For example, a microservice within an application can have its own technology stack that is different from other services and can be migrated to a new technology stack or modified to include new features without impacting any connected microservices or the larger application. The modular isolation guaranteed by microservices helps in easy customization or adding new features or experimenting with new programming languages and technology frameworks in the business’s digital ecosystem continuously without worrying about technology compatibility or environmental requirements as these are unique to the microservice alone and can be customized in any way.
Scalability
It is possible for technology teams to enable isolated scalability of individual microservices and hence limit the cost and complexity usually associated with a scalability initiative since the larger application remains intact. Microservices enable developers to target individual capabilities when scalability requirements come in over the course of the application’s lifetime in the business.
Faster Time to Market
Microservices architecture enables faster development of features as well as rapid quality assurance checks to happen since both development and QA teams deal with a rather small individualized service or capability module rather than having to re-engineer the entire application from scratch. This allows new feature rollouts to the market to happen at a faster rate and with lower collaborative efforts leading to lesser complexity.
Lower Learning Curve
When new members are added to the technology development team, they experience significantly lower learning curves when the application is comprised of smaller microservices working in tandem to realize business objectives rather than a single block of monolithic application code. Knowledge transfer can be more precise and learning or training initiatives can be streamlined more consistently. This will lead to better staff productivity levels and lower defects in the application development lifecycle.
Moving to a microservice architecture offers a slew of benefits for enterprises, but that doesn’t mean that every monolithic application needs to be migrated into the microservices architecture in pursuit of these benefits. Businesses need to evaluate the potential of larger applications to be decomposed into individual application services that can be connected to a common goal or workflow for application performance. Smaller applications that have relatively simple monolithic architectures can perform better on their own rather than when converted into microservices. Deciding on when to switch to microservices has its own set of guidelines and best practices to be followed. Skipping them can also lead to costly mistakes for the business.
While devising an enterprise application strategy to include microservices, it is important to have the right advisory and guidance before
deciding to invest and transition your enterprise’s technology landscape. Get in touch with us to know how to evaluate the possibility of success for a microservices approach for your enterprise apps and how to make a smooth and effortless transition if it is feasible.