Some technical benefits of microservices

In previous articles, I tried to explain business benefits of microservices and when to incorporate them into your company. Understanding the what and when should help you to determine if microservices are beneficial to your company, or not. In this article, I will explain technical aspects of microservices. Understanding them more thoroughly on a technical level is beneficial for your engineering team who will be designing and monitoring them.

High​ ​scalability

A single, large monolithic service may be slow due to its many functioning parts. If a feature in your monolith is in high demand, replicating this as a microservice is good way to make it highly available. This will enhance its performance by separating the multiple server so that they don’t depend on or impact the same server.

Low​ ​impact​ ​on​ ​other​ ​services

A popular quote says that “you’re only as strong as your weakest link.” That is very true for monolithic designs. If just one part of a monolithic service fails, it is likely that it will interrupt the entire service. However, if your microservices that are designed in the manner of a fault tolerant have more room for error. If one microservice fails, it will not affect other microservices. It can be repaired on its own and quickly restored without completely shutting down your entire application.

Ease of deployment

A monolithic architecture type is generally difficult all around. It is hard to deploy and takes a lot of time to distribute because it is such a big artifact. Even attempting to upload such a big artifactto all of your servers takes a lot of time. Not only does it take a lot of time, but it is extremely complex to do too. Instead, if you make your application in small parts with microservices, it instantly becomes easier to manage. You will not need as much server to server functionality as you would with a monolithic design. The size of your artifacts will also be lower with microservices. This will result in an application deployment that is faster and easier overall.

Freedom​ ​to​ ​choose​ ​technology

A monolithic application design will require you to choose one type of technology in order to make the design of it easier. Microservices allow you to choose different technology for each part based on what suits it best. For example, some parts of your application will have different load characteristics. To accommodate for this, microservices are able to have individual technology that is best suited for its function.

Easy​ ​to​ ​understand

Microservices are much easier to understand because they are broken down and simplified pieces of an application, versus an entire system all in one place like a monolith.

Natural​ ​data​ ​encapsulation

For those working with relational dbs, this is an important factor. When developed in single functionality, there will be a single entrance into your microservice. This can be the main key in your microservice. Thus, the data that it encapsulates will not be coupled to outside application, making it easy to scale data services.

Microservices have many great benefits which I have discussed in other articles. The technical benefits add even more appeal to microservices over monolithic application architecture. If the freedom to choose different technology, high scalability, low impact on other services, and being easy to understand are important in your application design, creating microservices will certainly be helpful to you. In my next article i will try to show some ways and technologies to make your microservices highly available.

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