What is the Microservice Architecture?

Tackling complexity in large software systems has always been a daunting task since the early days of software development. Over the years, software engineers and software architects have made many attempts to unravel the complexities of software systems.

Since the 2010s, these techniques have fallen short of tackling the complexities of web-scale applications or modern large-scale enterprise applications. As a result, architects and engineers developed a new approach to solving the complexity of software systems in modern times: Microservice Architecture.

In this blog, we’ll explore:

1. What is the Microservice Architecture?
2. What are the Basic Features of Microservice Architecture?
3. How Microservice Architecture Should Be?
4. What are the Advantages of Microservice Architecture?

What is the Microservice Architecture?

Microservices are basically independent software services that provide a specific feature or function in a yazılım application and serve a single purpose. These services must be independently maintainable, traceable, and deployable.

Microservices are modular projects that have a single responsibility and do only one job.

Microservice architecture is an approach with mechanisms that should be considered as a small service in a modular structure, each service can carry out its own business and communication, are not very complex and have less dependency on other services while developing a single application. These services are focused on a single job for which they are responsible and have an automated deployment mechanism that can work independently. It should be fairly free of central government mechanisms. It can be developed in different programming languages ​​and different database technologies can be used.

Each microservice works with other services (loosely coupled) with very few dependencies. These services are self-contained and offer a single functionality (or a group of common functionality).

On any service developed in accordance with the microservice architecture, the developer can work independently, thus facilitating the development phase.

What are the Basic Features of Microservice Architecture?

• Decoupling — Services in a system are largely independent of each other.
• Componentization — Microservices are self-contained components that can be easily modified and upgraded.
• Business Capabilities — A microservice is simple and focused on a single task.
• Autonomy — Developers and teams can work independently, enabling rapid development and testing.
• Continuous Delivery — Automatically allows for frequent software releases to go live with systematic automation of software development, testing, and validation. As services can be deployed individually, deployment time is shortened and cost is reduced over time.
• Decentralized Governance — The focus is on using the right tool for the right job. This means that it does not require a standard technology or structure. Developers have the freedom to choose the best technology to solve their problems.
• Agility — Microservices support agility. Any new feature can be rapidly developed and adapted to the system.

How Microservice Architecture Should Be?

• Microservices should be able to run on different machines and all services should be able to communicate with each other by themselves. A new service must be developed and deployable without causing any change to other services.
• Microservices should be deployed automatically through the necessary stages (Unit Tests, Integration Tests, Sonarqube, Automation Tests). This mechanism increases the quality of the project.
• Each service should be able to be developed, tested and deployed independently. This increases the quality and flexibility of the application.
• Each developer should be able to develop independently on the service he/she is interested in, develop a new service himself/herself, and these services should be deployable without affecting other services.
• When developing for a service, the development on that service should not affect the entire project so other features are still operational.
• The latest or most suitable technology can be used to meet the requirements. Each service can use a different language or a different database. Each different feature can be performed by a different team using a different technology independently of other features.
• All services should be separated into different microservices according to their areas, tasks and features.
• These microservices have their own load balancer and application environments to perform their functions and must also store data in their own databases.
• All microservices must communicate with each other via REST or Message Bus. Both can be used.
• All functions performed by Microservices must be communicated to clients via API Gateway. All internal endpoints connect to API Gateway. Thus, anyone connecting to the API Gateway should be able to automatically connect to the entire system.

What are the Advantages of Microservice Architecture?

• Independent Deployment — Services can be deployed independently on any platform.
• Independent Development — The entire microservice can be easily developed according to its own functionality.
• A problem with any service does not affect other services, so users are in a position to use other services.
• Fault Isolation — Since a problem that may occur in any service of the project will not affect the other services of the project, the system still continues to work.
• The problem can be eliminated by multiplexing the service under the traffic, without requiring that the traffic that will occur in any service scale the entire system.
• Scalable — Each component can be scaled to its own needs, no need to scale all components.
• Technology Diversity — Different languages ​​and technologies can be used when developing different services for the same project.

To conclude, microservice architecture is a very useful and useful tool for modern software development. For large businesses that normally develop complex software, microservice architecture is the only way to overcome complexity and stay competitive in the marketplace. For small and medium businesses too, microservices architecture should be used for sustainable software development that can deliver long-term benefits. It should be noted that the first adopters of the microservice architecture (Spotify, Netflix, Linkedin, Amazon, Google) gained significant competitive advantages over their competitors’ thanks to their microservice architecture.