It’s 2022 and huge servers are out, microservices are in
Microservices are not just a trend, they are the beginning of a revolution in the technology space
After reading this article, I’m sure you will begin falling in love with microservices as I have. Now if you have seen any big companies' architecture, let’s take Amazon, for example, you would see an example of microservices at work. At Amazon’s re:Invent 2015 conference, Amazon AWS senior manager for product management Rob Brigham discussed the beginnings of microservices for the Amazon marketplace. “If you go back to 2001, the Amazon.com retail website was a large architectural monolith.” Birmingham continues saying, “Now, don’t get me wrong. It was architected in multiple tiers, and those tiers had many components in them, but they’re all very tightly coupled together, where they behaved like one big monolith.” This is what most developers find and what most developers are taught when studying design and system architecture.
Birmingham continues by saying, “Now, a lot of startups, and even projects inside of big companies, start out this way. They take a monolith-first approach, because it’s very quick, to get moving quickly. But over time, as that project matures, as you add more developers on it, as it grows and the code base gets larger and the architecture gets more complex, that monolith is going to add overhead into your process, and that software development lifecycle is going to begin to slow down.” This process that Birmingham touches on the software development lifecycle, has become standard knowledge among engineers and SCRUM masters alike, but in 2001, Amazon helped lead the way for what we now know as cloud computing.
Birmingham later explained how the monolithic architecture seen in the original Amazon.com, gave way to what we know today, the separation of service architectures. And while maybe Amazon didn't come up with the name or the complete idea, it was one idea in the right direction to attract the attention of NASA and the beginning of cloud computing and serverless architecture. Now if you follow any big tech corporation, Netflix, Microsoft, IBM, or Tesla, microservices are at the core of their models. This is due to the incredible flexibility, reusability, and expandability of microservices. This structured quick video can give you a better idea of what I mean when I say microservices.
Microservices can let any language-based service with an API communicate with any other language-based service allowing for servers to decouple and make up more than a single monolithic engine, more like 20 different gears powering the same device. The true potential of this can be seen when thinking about the usability of different programming languages. Let's say for example that you had a website front end built with Next.js that was a dashboard for your clients, as is commonly construed, Python is great for creating graphs, manipulating data, and working with massive computations of data compared to other languages. But your engineers love ASP.NET for their servers and don't want to maintain anything else, what do you do?
With a single server this problem seems impossible, maybe find some outdated rewrite of pandas in C sharp? But instead of that, you can create a python microservice to handle the heavy lifting for you, having direct access to your database and your .NET server, it can not only easily expand if more processing power is needed but also easily communicate along an API. The best of both worlds! Cloud computing has become so incredibly powerful and useful when finding solutions for big world problems, that there is no reason to not at least learn it and take a dive into this new architecture. While Amazon may have been interested in this topic since the early 2000s, many startups and newer companies are just starting to implement and reap the benefits of this new system, systemic optimization at its finest level.
