After the evolution of cloud application development & deployment has changed drastically but one core thing remained same about the applications is the time to market. Any small change requires entire application to be tested and deployed which limits the business to achieve the goals to maximize the revenue of each opportunity available in the market. Traditional architecture approach which is generally known as monolith is now getting transformed into new microservices based architecture model. Before jumping into the detailed understanding of the microservices let us see what is monolith & attributes associated with it…I will be publishing learning series to help understand the underlying core concepts of microservices architecture(MSA)
Monolith : It typically starts with a common simple codebase with defined tech stack and becomes non-maintainable over the period of time that qualifies to be called as “monolith”. Some attributes associated with it are….
- Long testing cycles for each deployment cycle(Automation helps but to limited extent)
- Defined tech stack
- Results in too many issues for small changes
- High learning curve (complex codebase)
- Maintained by large teams
- Too many/Complex dependencies etc (Tightly coupled)
SOA came to the rescue but….
- Resulted in tightly coupled services based monolith
- One dimension scalability
- Carried forward all the problems from traditional monolith design, development & deployment
Microservices is an architecture paradigm which breaks large software monolith architectures into loosely coupled services, which communicate with each other through simple APIs and can be independently created, deployed without impacting the ecosystem. Adheres to some common principles…
- Single Responsibility Principle (Self-contained & autonomous)
- Owned by small team
- Small code base
- Supports Polyglot tech stack with technology agnostic interfaces
- Deployed in independent containers
- Domain Driven Design
Microservices Architecture (MSA) is topping the charts of technology industry discussions, People are both overwhelmed & confused about architecture pattern which has announced itself with great promises. We have to be cautious not to get carried away with the blind implementation irrespective of the scenario of business context.
Please understand the details of MSA and your business context before jumping into the implementation. MSA does require high degree of commitment, skills and there is additional complexity, structural changes for which your team/organization needs to plan well to scale the operations to live with it. MSA is not a free lunch 🙂
Below I’m calling out the advantages, disadvantages & implementation challenges of MSA based on exposure to some of the ecommerce based implementations:
|
Advantages |
Disadvantages |
Implementation Challenges
|
|
|
|
Above challenges are only subset of the bigger list and most of them have solution in their own context of design & architecture problems but there is no one solution which that fits all. Hence please ensure the due diligence to apply the fixes for the problems. Also some core things you can do are…
Ensure you have ….
- Right team who are up for the challenge
- Start small to make improvements on the way (Big bang is the recipe for failure) – Simplicity helps
- Leverage right tools & automations to help the MSA cause
- Embrace team, customer & product goals
- Pragmatic approach works 🙂
References:
