How can microservices influence business growth?

The idea of scalability is simple – given more resources, your enterprise can perform better. You can apply it to your company, where more resources mean a corresponding increase in sales, or to software architecture, where it represents the ability to grow and evolve with increased demand.

Microservices architecture is all about planning ahead and making sure you’re ready for what’s to come. What exactly are the potential benefits of microservices and how do they implement scalability? We’re here to provide the answer!

The main reason to build microservices architecture is the desire to develop a given business area in isolation from the rest. Such an approach allows you to add new functionalities to a given module with minimal impact on the rest of the system. The idea behind it is to gain independence in development and deployment. Since microservices are organized around business requirements, the development team is more familiar with the users’ expectations and is in a position to understand the business perspective. The better the level of understanding, the better the alignment with the business.

Think of microservices architecture as a self-contained philosophy, in opposition to the monolithic architecture approach. In monolithic architecture, the application is considered to be a single unit, composed of many elements that serve a unified purpose. What microservices architecture does is break the connection between these elements, turning each of them into an independent unit.

Microservices architecture is, by definition, lightweight. By separating every component of an application into an individual microservice, we can focus on the specific business need which each module is responsible for. These independent modules communicate with each other, working as a collective of units, instead of a single monolith. Since your business processes are then separated, it is easier to scale the most important ones at any given moment, instead of the entire application.

The best way to describe microservices is to show how different they are to a monolithic approach. While monolithic architecture might be simpler in terms of design and deployment, it lacks flexibility in scaling and agility in development.

Also, as technology develops, your framework will become increasingly obsolete, requiring a ground-up rework to remain functional.

Microservices architecture is designed as a solution to this exact problem too. With independent components, every service can be modified and deployed separately, giving you a lot more flexibility than with a monolith. It also makes each process easier to understand, as we don’t depend on the entire application and we can focus on developing a single component.

Of course, it doesn’t mean that microservices architecture is the perfect solution and objectively better in each case. Microservices introduce a degree of complexity into the framework. By disconnecting every piece of the whole, you need to make sure that each one of them functions flawlessly in isolation. The connections between modules can be especially difficult to handle, and more modules means more testing – meaning you need a suitable dev team for the task. Continuous integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) are very important. In our opinion they are crucial if we want to build the microservices architecture.

Efficiency is of the utmost importance in microservices ecosystems. Achieving efficiency and scalability of our architecture, where tasks are sometimes shared out between dozens (if not hundreds) of small services, can be very difficult.

While focusing on the benefits of the approach, one should not forget the challenges associated with increased complexity. In order to achieve the desired level of scalability of the architecture, while maintaining fast and successful implementation, it is necessary to properly organize the workflow and development process. Without adequate planning and organization, success cannot be achieved. You can have the best programmers, but if you don’t manage correctly, the project will not succeed.

The idea of microservices architecture is the result of years of evolution of the best practices in the IT industry. As companies aim to improve customer experience, the choice to split every process into an individual unit seems natural – this way, you can ensure that every component of your application works best.

As your business features are split into separate entities, each one can be created, tested, and run independently. It also means they can be modified in isolation, without disrupting your business operations. A constant or even increased delivery speed, while maintaining flexibility in terms of implementing changes, is something every CEO is looking for, and microservices architecture makes sure of it. Check out more research on the topic!

By implementing a microservices application, the company achieves massively scalable infrastructure. Adding on-demand and pay-per-use billing to this improves operational efficiency and enables cost optimization. Cloud-based microservices streamline your app delivery and help your products get to market faster.

Now that you know how impactful microservices can be to a company’s growth, let’s summarize their direct benefits:

• They improve scalability by allowing you to scale each component independently.
• They make applications much easier to understand by breaking them up into “bite-sized” elements
• They are adaptive to new technologies

Don’t forget – simpler systems often won’t need to be broken down into microservices, as it will only lead to confusion. With more complex systems, however, microservices architecture is potentially a good way to go.

Interested in transforming your company with microservices infrastructure and creating scalable apps? Scalo offers the effective implementation of scaling-optimized solutions – contact us and let us know how we can help with your project!