Key benefits of Micro-services

The term micro-services refers to systems that work together (usually through network calls) but are independent of each other and not tightly coupled. The opposite of this is a monolithic architecture where a single application is responsible for everything.

Microservices are a group of lightweight purpose-specific services that communicate over a network and are scoped according to business capabilities, to provide a reliable and scalable application system.

1. Reliability #

Primary benefit of using the micro service architecture is the reliability that a distributed system provides. If there is a failure at one point of the system, the rest of the system can continue functioning, with degraded performance of the affected part.

With containerized deployments, the risk of complete failure is further eliminated by having multiple containers per service. If one container goes down, the other containers can keep running until the problem is resolved and the system is back to it’s full capacity.

2. Scalability #

If a system has multiple distinct parts which serve different business functions, and one of the parts might need much higher performance than another one, for example - the web server might need higher performance hardware compared to another part that is rarely used. In case of a monolithic architecture, the entire system would need to be scaled for performance improvement, but with the micro-service architecture, only the services that need the extra performance can be scaled up.

The type of hardware used for each service can improve the performance, since cloud infrastructure can be optimized for a particular specification like storage optimized or compute optimized.

3. Deployment #

Switching to a micro service architecture can greatly simplify the release process. With a monolithic architecture, even smaller changes made to the system require the entire application to be released at once, which may lead to unfavourable release timelines.

When using micro services, each independent service can have it’s own release cycle and deployment schedule making deployments more reliable and decoupled. This mitigates the risk of one big release which could lead to downtime if things go wrong.

4. Diversification #

Technology gets outdated at a rapid pace and a monolithic architecture has a potential to miss out on all the improvements to performance and security that the latest tech might offer. Micro service architecture can leverage different tech stacks for each service and has the advantage of using the optimum tools for each service based on what it needs to do. This architecture makes it easier to upgrade only a certain part of the system, without affecting the other parts.

Conclusion #

There are lots of potential benefits to using a micro-service architecture. There are a few downsides to keep in mind as well - for example the complexity of managing multiple services, finding proficient developers for each service, release and dependency management, etc. Selecting the appropriate architecture for a project depends highly on the size of the project, the dependent systems and technical expertise within the team.