What are microservices used for?

The microservices architecture provides a lot of freedom to companies when working on their platforms, processes and applications. Under this structure, the software is made up of just small services that are independent of each other and communicated by defined APIs. This allows scalability, flexibility, and agility to grow across all workflows.

“With a microservices architecture, an application is built with separate components that run each application process as a service. These services communicate through a well-defined interface using lightweight APIs”, they explained in this regard in the AWS documentation. Each service executes a single business function.

It is not a tool for the future, as it is in full adoption today: a study showed that 63% of companies are adopting microservices, seeing results such as:

• Employee efficiency improvements.
• Better user or end customer experience.
• Savings in infrastructure costs.

Characteristics of Microservices

• In the microservices architecture, the software is broken down into several independent functional parts. Each of these services can be edited, run, and updated without affecting the other services in the framework.
• If in the monolithic architecture, team members focus on one area of the application, in the microservices architecture multifunctional modules are used.
• Each module in the microservices architecture is decentralized and has its own database.
• Microservices can be developed with a minimal team.
• Integration and deployment are easy.

What are microservices used for?

For beginners, the term microservices may sound a bit abstract, but here we are going to explain the use cases of this architecture.

• Legacy Application Modernization

Going from a new system to a more modern one always generates stress and headaches when structuring all the data we already had. What is essential is that the architecture be solid, scalable and flexible, that it can continue to grow over time while staying up-to-date. Microservices can help you with this.

• Data processing in real time

Another benefit of the microservices architecture is that it enables asynchronous communication to process and analyze data in real time. This is more tangible if we analyze streaming services like Netflix, for example.

• Big Data Applications

“Big data must be collected, ingested, processed, and delivered using a data pipeline-oriented architecture. Microservices fit naturally into this type of architecture, as each step in a data pipeline handles a small task," they detailed in a QAT Global article.

• Companies that are growing very fast

The microservices architecture is especially beneficial for very fast-growing companies, as it allows them to seamlessly adapt to growth and all the changes that come with it.

Companies using microservices development

Netflix

“Every day it receives an average of one billion calls to its different services (it is said to be responsible for 30% of Internet traffic) and it is capable of adapting to more than 800 types of devices through its video streaming API, the which to offer a more stable service, for each request we ask, it makes five requests to different servers to never lose the continuity of the transmission ”, they explained on the subject on the Open Webinars portal.

Amazon

It was one of the first large companies to migrate to a microservices architecture, processing thousands of web and mobile app requests every second.

Ebay 

They significantly improved the efficiency of their teams' work, and at the same time, they set up microservices to improve the customer experience.

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