What are microservices? List of basic concepts you should know

Microservices is one of the terms that has become more popular in the technology industry in recent years since it came to transform and improve many of the company's processes.

Why is it attractive for business? Because microservices partition processes efficiently, it enables independent deployment and speeds delivery. But let's start this article with the definition of microservices.

What are microservices?

When we talk about microservices, we mean a style of architecture “that enables fast, frequent, and reliable delivery of large, complex applications. It also allows an organization to evolve its technology stack”, they explained in this regard on the Microservices.io portal.

The role of microservices is to structure an application as a collection of services, they added in the same article. The characteristics of these services are the following:

• Highly maintainable and verifiable
• Loosely coupled
• Deployable independently
• Organized around business capabilities

With the implementation of the microservices architecture, companies scale applications more easily, as well as being faster to develop.

Characteristics of microservices

Microservices are autonomous

Perhaps one of the main attractions of microservices is precisely the autonomy in the processes. Each service that integrates the microservices architecture can be manipulated individually, without affecting the operation of the other services.

“Services do not need to share any of their code or implementations with other services. Any communication between individual components occurs through well-defined APIs ”, they detailed in this regard in the AWS documentation.

Microservices are specialized

“Each service is designed for a set of capabilities and is focused on solving a specific problem. If developers add more code to a service over time and the service becomes complex, it can be broken down into smaller services,” they noted in an AWS article.

Advantages of microservices architecture

• Improve scalability

The scalability that you will achieve with microservices is higher, since it becomes much easier to add, remove or make any adjustments to the services that are in the architecture. Each service is independent and changes made to one will not affect another.

• Improved fault isolation

“Under a monolithic architecture structure, when developers experience a failure in one element of the architecture, they will collapse all components of the architecture. With a microservices architecture, if one service fails, other parts of the application are much less likely to fail because each microservice runs independently", explained in the Gitlab documentation.

• Simple to implement

The microservices architecture offers advantages to developers, as they can add new modules and tweaks to the architecture, without having to redesign the structure. Again, thanks to the independence of each of the service modules.

• Faster time to market

Because microservices are scalable, independent, and easy to implement, the speed of development increases, so the time to market for systems and apps is much faster than using the monolithic architecture.

“Development teams working on different microservices don't have to wait for others to finish. Companies can quickly develop and deploy new features and update older components as new technologies allow them to evolve,” they added in the same Gitlab article.

If you want to transform the way your projects and processes are developed, a good way to start is by studying the functionalities of microservices and how they can benefit your business.

Do you want to know more about microservices? At Rootstack, we have +10 years of experience supporting global companies in their digital transformation. Contact us!

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