What Are Microservices | Beginner's Guide

Microservices are a software architecture component that enables organizations to develop and deploy applications as sets of small, independent functions. Microservices can be implemented at the application level or at the infrastructure level.

They can also be used as an overlay on top of existing monolithic applications to improve performance and scalability by allowing for easier management of individual microservice components.

Microservices are "fine-grained" application components that can be independently developed and deployed, and easily combined with other components

Microservices are small, independent units of software. Each microservice is typically written in a different language or technology and can be easily combined with other microservices to build an application.

Microservices can be independently developed and deployed, allowing for continuous innovation throughout the lifecycle of your application. For example, if you’re building a mobile app that needs to sync with your backend system, you might use REST APIs to communicate between each component (your mobile app and your backend system).

Microservices are decoupled

Microservices are decoupled.

Decoupled from each other: the microservices can be independently deployed, updated, and scaled.

Decoupled from the infrastructure: they're not bound to a specific server, operating system, or programming language.

Decoupled from the database: individual services can be hosted on different databases (e.g., SQL, NoSQL) and/or use other data models (e.g., key-value store vs. document database).

Microservice-based applications are typically structured as a set of discrete microservices that are bounded by APIs

Microservice-based applications are typically structured as a set of discrete microservices bounded by APIs.

Each microservice is a single application logic unit and can be developed and deployed independently, which makes it easier to scale, maintain, and evolve the system.

The services communicate through well-defined APIs instead of directly sharing data like traditional monolithic applications. This makes the communication between services asynchronous and decoupled from each other.

Microservices may sometimes be referred to as "lightweight" services to contrast them with the more traditional, heavier monolithic services

It is important to note that microservices may sometimes be referred to as "lightweight" services to contrast them with the more traditional, heavier monolithic services.

The smaller size of a microservice can lead to quicker development and deployment times, which means they are easier to maintain and scale. In addition, deploying many different microservices in parallel makes it possible for teams within an organization or across organizations (for example, between a product team and its development team) to work on multiple projects at once.

Implementing microservices can be a significant architectural change for many organizations and developers

Implementing microservices can be a major architectural change for many organizations and developers. Microservices are not just a new way of thinking about software design but also represent an alternative approach to developing applications.

For some organizations, it may be the case that the existing monolithic application does not make sense to break apart into separate pieces. However, for those that do want to take advantage of this new technology stack, there are two distinct approaches:

Break up an existing monolith into multiple services through refactoring

Develop standalone applications using microservices

Microservices can benefit an organization's IT practices, including greater agility and faster innovation cycles in versioning and deploying new services or features

Microservices are more minor, self-contained units of software that can be independently deployed, versioned, and scaled. These small applications can be quickly developed and deployed faster than monolithic applications. While it might take months to build a new feature in a large application, with microservices, that same feature could be developed in days or weeks instead.

Microservices also have several other benefits over monolithic applications—they’re easier to scale; they’re easier to maintain; they’re easier to test, and they’re much easier to deploy.

Implementing a microservice architecture is not without its drawbacks, however. For example, microservices can add complexity to an organization's infrastructure's overall structure of IT resources

The three main drawbacks of microservices are:

Complexity: It is not uncommon for a single monolithic application to be replaced by hundreds or even thousands of microservices, leading to the increased complexity of the overall IT structure in an organization's infrastructure. For example, if you have a monolithic application with ten servers and want to break it into two microservices with 20 servers each, then the number will be more than doubled (40 vs. 20). This means that your overall infrastructure may need more resources to accommodate this increase in complexity.

Debugging: A typical workflow for debugging an issue on a monolithic app is: to locate the code responsible for this issue, fix the bug, push updates out; wait until all new instances receive those updates; test again—and hopefully get positive results! The same workflow applies here, too but much more complicated because it involves multiple steps and components! You'd have to find each separate component first before being able to address any issues related thereto! And then there are times when specific bugs might take hours (or even days) just because no one knows where exactly its root cause lies within a complex system(s).

Scalability/Maintenance hassles: Adding capacity becomes difficult due to growing deployment costs due to its distributed nature. This leads us back into having multiple instances running at different locations across different physical machines instead of just one single machine hosting all services together."

Microservices offer many benefits over monolithic software architecture

Microservices make it much easier to scale your application. In a monolithic architecture, you're limited by how many resources you can allocate to a single application instance. If your server is maxed out and needs more processing power, then there's not much you can do about it. However, with microservices architecture, each service is deployed independently from the others and has its dedicated resources (e.g., RAM).

This means that if one service becomes too resource-intensive for the number of users it serves or if another service gets more traffic than expected due to some promotion or event that happened on social media, then only those instances will need more computing power while other services are unaffected because they're running at their ideal capacity level!

Deploying new functionality is also faster since each microservice is small enough so that no special deployment procedures are required beyond uploading files onto an FTP server (or git push). You don't have to worry about compiling code or making sure all dependencies are included since all dependencies will be provided by your system package manager, like aptitude/yum/homebrew, etc.

Conclusion

Microservices are a way of designing software applications that can help make them easier to develop, deploy and maintain. They may also make your organization's IT infrastructure more resilient and agile and more able to deliver new features faster. However, implementing microservice architecture requires careful planning to avoid pitfalls such as increased complexity or reduced performance due to network latency between services.