Microservices Architecture for Enterprise Large-Scaled Application
In this article, we are going to learn Microservices Architecture and Best Practices when designing any software architecture for our projects.
By this article, we are going to learn Microservices Architecture, Benefits and Challenges of Microservices Architecture and Design our E-Commerce application with Microservices Architecture.
I have just published a new course — Design Microservices Architecture with Patterns & Principles.
Architecture Design Journey
There are many approaches and patterns that evolved over decades of software development, and all have their own benefits and challenges.
In the last article, we have learned and designed e-commerce application with Modular Monolithic Architecture style. Now we will focus on how it can be better isolate Backend and Frontend layers with Headless Architecture in order to provide isolation.
- Why we are learning Microservices Architecture ?
Because according to our learning flow, we ask ourselves
- What’s wrong with this current architecture ?
- How can we improve the current design ?
With these questions we created a problem about Modular Monolithic architecture and try to solve this problem during the article. Problem is Scale and Deploy Independently :
Business teams are separated teams as per departments; Product, Sale, Payment. All teams wants to add new features immediately to compete the market. So Business teams wants to agile, innovate and experiment with new features as soon as possible, in order to compete the market, they would like to deploy features immediately, not waiting for deployment dates.
Also Business teams would like to be flexible scale for market peek times They want to provide best customer experience at blackfriday sales that means it requires to handle and process millions of request in a acceptable latency with better performance.
And as a solution we have decided to learn Microservices Architecture for Large-scaled applications. For that reason, we will learn
- Microservices Architecture
- Benefits and Challenges of Microservices Architecture
- When to use Microservices Architecture
What are Microservices ?
Microservices are small, independent, and loosely coupled services. So Microservices are small business services that can work together and can be deployed independently and autonomously. Each service is a separate codebase, which can be managed by a small development team. A single small team of developers can write and maintain a particular microservice.
Microservices communicates with each other over the network protocols. Services communicate with each other by using well-defined APIs. Internal implementation details of each service are hidden from other services. One of the biggest advantages is that they can be deployed independently. Microservices can be deployed independently. A team can update an existing service without rebuilding and redeploying the entire application.
Services don’t need to share the same technology stack, libraries, or frameworks. Microservices can work with many different technology stacks which is technology agnostic. Microservices has its own database or persistence layer that is not shared with other services. This differs from the traditional model, where a separate data layer handles data persistence.
What is Microservices Architecture ?
Microservices architecture is an approach to software development that structures an application as a collection of small, independent, and loosely-coupled services that communicate with each other through APIs.
In a microservices architecture, each service is responsible for a specific business capability or domain, and can be developed and deployed independently from the other services. This approach contrasts with a monolithic architecture, where all the functionality of the application is packaged into a single unit.
Microservices (martinfowler.com): The microservice architectural style is an approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms, often an HTTP or gRPC API.
These services are built around business capabilities and independently deployable by fully automated deployment process. There is a bare minimum of centralized management of these services, which may be written in different programming languages and use different data storage technologies. The microservice architecture decomposes an application into small independent services that communicate over well-defined APIs.
Since each service can be developed and maintained by autonomous teams, it is the most scalable method for software development. These services are owned by small, self-contained teams. Microservices architectures make applications easier to scale and faster to develop, enabling innovation and accelerating time-to-market for new features.
So we can say that, Microservices architecture is a cloud-native architectural approach in which applications composed of many loosely coupled and independently deployable smaller components. Microservices
- have their own technology stack, included the database and data management model,
- communicate to each other over a combination of REST APIs, event streaming, and message brokers,
- are organized by business capability, with the line separating services often referred to as a bounded context.
Robert Martin coined the term single responsibility principle that basically referring separating responsibilities as per services. So we can follow the SRP principles when thinking microservices.
A microservices architecture takes this same approach and extends it to the loosely coupled services which can be developed, deployed, and maintained independently. Each of these services is responsible for different tasks and can communicate with other services through Restful APIs in order to solve a larger complex business problem.
Benefits of Microservices Architecture
The main benefits of microservices architecture include:
- Scalability: With microservices, each service can be scaled independently, allowing the application to handle increased traffic and load more easily.
- Agility: Microservices architecture enables faster development cycles, as each service can be developed, tested, and deployed independently.
- Resilience: Because each service is independent, failures in one service do not necessarily affect the rest of the application.
- Flexibility: Microservices allow for more flexibility in technology choices, as each service can be developed using the most appropriate technology for its specific requirements.
- Easy integration with third-party services: Microservices can be easily integrated with third-party services, as each service can be developed with its own API.
Drawbacks of Microservices Architecture
While microservices architecture offers several benefits, it also has some drawbacks that should be considered before implementing it:
- Increased complexity: Microservices architecture is more complex than traditional monolithic architecture, as it involves multiple services that communicate with each other. This can make development and maintenance more complex and require additional resources and expertise.
- Distributed system challenges: With microservices architecture, the services are distributed across multiple servers, which can create challenges related to data consistency, network latency, and service discovery.
- Testing and debugging challenges: Testing and debugging can be more complex in a microservices architecture, as there are multiple services that need to be tested and debugged independently, as well as integration testing across services.
- Management overhead: With microservices architecture, there is additional overhead associated with managing multiple services, including deployment, scaling, and monitoring.
When to use Microservices ?
Microservices architecture is a good choice for complex, large-scale applications that require a high level of scalability, availability, and agility. It can also be a good fit for organizations that need to integrate with multiple third-party services or systems.
However, microservices architecture is not a one-size-fits-all solution, and it may not be the best choice for all applications. It requires additional effort in terms of designing, implementing, and maintaining the services, as well as managing the communication between them. Additionally, the overhead of coordinating between services can result in increased latency and decreased performance, so it may not be the best choice for applications that require high performance or low latency.
What Elon Musk think about Microservices ?
Lets continue to a tweet thread from Elon Musk about Twitter Architecture :)
No comment.
From Kelsey Hightower
Lets continue to a tweet thread from Kelsey Hightower.
So, Microservices architecture is a good choice for organizations that require high scalability, availability, and agility, and are willing to invest in the additional effort required to design, implement, and maintain a microservices-based application.
Design Microservice Architecture — E-Commerce App
If we design e-commerce application with Microservice architecture, you can see the image below:
Product microservice can use NoSQL document database Shopping Cart microservice can use NoSQL key-value pair database and Order microservice can use Relational database as per microservice data storage requirements.
What’s Next ?
- Design Modular Monolithic Architecture for E-Commerce Applications
- Macro-services to Nano-services: Evolution of Software Architecture
- Microservices Architecture: Problems and Solutions with Pattern and Principles
Step by Step Design Architectures w/ Course
I have just published a new course — Design Microservices Architecture with Patterns & Principles.
In this course, we’re going to learn how to Design Microservices Architecture with using Design Patterns, Principles and the Best Practices. We will start with designing Monolithic to Event-Driven Microservices step by step and together using the right architecture design patterns and techniques.
