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Monolithic applications are big fat complex single applications that have high complexity. Besides, they are hard to maintain and not easily deployable as well. Failure in one part can bring the whole system down. higher database complexity, improper resource utilization, etc.
To give you a better idea of what monolithic architecture is, here are some of its characteristics:
Microservices architecture offers various advantages over Monolithic Architecture, some of which are listed below:
However, when transforming from a traditional monolithic architecture to microservices, the common bottleneck is performance. According to Perforce Developer (Perforce Survey) Survey:
A monolithic codebase is a very well-recognized problem many production systems that are existing for a long time are facing today. Re-architecting it with a completely new system comprising of domain-isolated microservices implemented from scratch is very rarely possible. Primarily because it's impractical to the business folks to shut down the existing system which ultimately has to fund this exercise and also because of the risks of failure associated with such a big-bang cutover.
The hyper-dynamic approach to business has led to the development of cloud computing in the form of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, with our current buzzword Microservices being aggressively sought for implementation. Notably, tech giants like Google, Walmart, and Amazon using it have grabbed the attention of the masses who look forward to revolutionizing their business processes with a modular approach.
You may also like: Deploying Your Microservices
By 2018, microservices architecture, a variant of service oriented architecture, had made itself the leading choice for developing any enterprise application. It’s not a jargon anymore; in fact it’s today’s reality for many products. We are very well aware of the driving forces behind the microservices architecture. Here, I am referring to the different driving forces such as tremendous agility, team autonomy, having a database per service, and so on.
I have designed microservices architectures from scratch and migrated enormous monoliths to microservices. In the last few years, I have witnessed the journey of a microservice technology stack. I have evaluated Netflix OSS, Spring Cloud, and Java’s native microservices stacks. However, this world is dominated by Kubernetes. In reality, Kubernetes was not conceptualized for microservices. However, the field has evolved in such a way that the Kubernetes ecosystem provides a comprehensive platform for microservices. Over the past few years, a state of the art has been established for microservices. This state of the art of governed by Kubernetes, Docer, Kafka, REST + JSON, GRPC + Protocol buffer and the cherry on the cake is Golang.
One of the primary problems facing enterprises is the problem of moving from monolith to microservices. The larger the enterprise, the bigger their monolithic applications become, and it gets harder to refactor them into a microservices architecture.
Everyone seems to agree on the benefits of microservices. We covered this topic at some length in this post. However, not many seem to agree on how to undertake the migration journey. Too often, the decision-making process turns into a chicken-and-egg problem. The bigger the monolith, the bigger the stakeholders' and management's footprint becomes. Too much management often leads to decision paralysis and, ultimately, the journey ends up as a mess.
Welcome to our latest episode of Tom's Tech Notes! In this episode, we'll hear advice from nine industry experts about the essential components you need to know when considering a microservices architecture.
As a primer and reminder from our initial post, these podcasts are compiled from conversations our analyst Tom Smith has had with industry experts from around the world as part of his work on our research guides.
Microservices are one of the biggest buzzwords of recent years. However, it turns out that it is a bit like teenage sex: everyone talks about it, but nobody really knows how to do it. What does it take to make good use of this architecture? What conditions do we have to meet so that it’s something more than just an item on your CV? Read the article to find out.
Several years ago, conferences were all about Service Oriented Architecture. In a nutshell, it consists of building large systems with many logically divided services integrated with each other. The idea was to eliminate the main problems related to monolithic architecture. Most SOA implementations were based on, or shifted over time toward, the Enterprise Service Bus. The bus was responsible for communication routing, document mapping, handling different types of endpoints, auditing, and security. The idea was noble, but the versatility of the solution turned out to be a double-edged sword. After some time, the bus turned into another monolith. Centralization, bottlenecks, both in terms of development and efficiency, and a single point of failure contributed to the growing criticism of the solution. I know cases where a 60-80-person team working on the bus turned out to be insufficient and a part of the communication had to be point-to-point so as not to block business projects.
Welcome back! If you missed Part 1, you can check it out here.
I hope that by now you are pretty much clear about what a microservice is and have started analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of it. I tried to keep it simple by giving just an overview of what a microservice should look like, but there’s a lot more to it that I won’t be covering in this series. Though I would like to mention a key difference between microservices and SOA (Service Oriented Architecture). Yes, the two are not the same and that is because SOA does not talk about the service deployment and it is the reason that when we build a system using SOA we end up building it in a monolithic style, where all the services are deployed altogether as one application. On the other hand, microservices are a subset of SOA, but they require that each of the services is independently deployed, meaning that they can be put on many different machines and any number of copies of the individual services could be deployed.