What exactly is microservices?
Microservices architecture is a technique used to build and design applications by decomposing the application into several microservices, each microservice provides specific functions and can be built, developed, and deployed independently without affecting other microservices.
Applications with microservices architecture are decomposed into different microservices and each microservice communicates with other microservices through the API Gateway. Instead of invoking the microservices directly by the users, client requests are redirected and routed to the endpoint of one or more internal microservices by the API gateway. Microservices could retrieve and store data in separated or shared databases. The decomposition of the functionalities provided by the application into different microservices increases the scalibility and maintainability of the application.
Now, let’s look at some of the main characteristics of the microservices architecture and their benefits
Isolation
Functionalities provided by the applications are decomposed into different microservices and each microservice provides specific business functions. This allows high cohesion and low coupling to be achieved in the system as each microservice focuses on one specific service and can be developed and deployed independently without affecting other microservices. Besides independent development and deployment for a single microservice, each microservice could also interact with an isolated database instead competing forthe access to a single central database with other microservices.
Scalibility
The isolation of the development and deployment of different microserivces makes the system flexiable and easy to maintain. Any modification and extension of one single microservice could be done indepdendently and will not affect the operations of other microservices, which enhances the maintainability. Microservices architecture also makes the system more scalable. Since an application is composed of multiple microservices which share no external dependencies, scaling the system to provide more services could be easily achieved by adding more internal microservices.
Flexibility
Microservice architecture does not impose restriction of choosing a single technology stack for the whole system development. Instead, each microservice can be developed in different programming languages and framework, which gives the developers freedom to choose the most suitable technology stack based on the their expertise and the requirements of the fuctions provided by the microservice.
In conclusion, microservice allows developers an application by decomposing the system into different microservices and each of the these services is developed and deployed separately and communicates with other microservices with the help of the API gateway. Microservices architecture introduce many essential benefits to the developers and operators of the system by making the system easy to build, test and maintain. However, microservices architecture is definitely not flawless, there are still some challanges in implementing microservices architecture which might be tricky to tackle for the developers. I hope you enjoy this article and find it informative and helpful!