A microservices architecture is based on the development of each individual application as a set of simpler software components, isolated during execution in their own process and communicating with each other using lightweight, standardized protocols.
The microservices development system is a natural evolution of the monolithic logic commonly used in IT for many years, which led to the creation of platforms consisting of a single, extremely sophisticated and complex application.
It is an advanced architecture that offers numerous advantages and solves important problems for IT departments, strategic planning managers, and companies’ business needs.
Containers and microservices
Every microservices architecture is based on the concept of containers, software that represents a logical container capable of virtualizing a host’s operating system and its resources, such as databases, by executing a process or set of processes in isolation from the rest of the system. The most widely used container currently in desktop, server, and cloud IT environments is Docker, which can run on dozens of Linux distributions and Windows Server.
The concept of containerizing an application together with all its components (binary code, runtime, libraries, configuration files, and so on) is common with Virtual Machines, or VMs, which have been in use in various fields for many years. The main difference is that Containers virtualize the operating system by sharing its kernel, without having to incorporate the entire operating system.
The immediate advantage is that they are much more compact in terms of space, start up faster, and allow for better optimization of the necessary resources. This also makes them easier to transport from development to production environments and allows them to operate with physical, virtual, public, private, or hybrid cloud servers with virtually no modification, thanks to the standards adopted by all providers that adopt and support microservice architectures.
When there are many modules that make up an application to manage, it would be difficult to act on each of them manually, so a tool must be adopted to simplify and automate the necessary operations, such as deployment, updating, and restarting interrupted services. These tools, which can easily and often completely automatically manage the operating and implementation requirements of each microservice, are known in technical jargon as orchestrators, and one of the most widely used currently is the open source Kubernetes.
The advantages of microservices
When designing an application as a set of simpler services, each dedicated to a single functionality, it is then possible to proceed in parallel with the actual development, allocating specific human and technological resources to each individual component so that the project can progress even with different timelines between the various modules necessary for its operation.
The individual components of the development teams of a microservices architecture can test and release the various modules more quickly, thanks in part to greater specialization over time on individual components, without having to know in detail how the entire application works.
If you need to update a complex monolithic application, you must consider the impact of the changes on the entire project, whereas working on individual, well-defined, independent services drastically reduces time to market. Detecting and fixing a bug naturally takes less time in a microservices architecture, and it is much less likely that its existence will affect or block the operation of the entire software, as is easily the case in monolithic platforms.
When system updates need to be performed, thanks to the isolation offered by containers, it will be sufficient to operate virtually on a single host operating system or database engine, which, if proprietary rather than open source licenses are used, results in significant savings in terms of both time and money.