In addition to scalability, one of the best features of microservices architecture is that if one of the services fails, another will be deployed in its place.
In today's hyper-competitive market, the ideal path for your business should be obvious. In other words, you want to always be ahead or ahead of the curve. This means your developers and IT team will always be learning new technologies and best practices. As you learn new skills and adopt new software stacks, you will find that a series of decisions must be made.
An important decision you will face is whether to opt for microservices architecture or monolithic architecture. Make the right choice for your company and you will reap big gains. Make the wrong choice and you'll find yourself in a constant, uphill battle to keep your data center running smoothly.
Such a bad decision can be a nightmare for your developers, whether they work with Java, JavaScript, Ruby or .NET. This can also affect the entire app development process. Therefore, it is critical that those in your company who make such important decisions understand what you are getting yourself into.
So what are these architectures? Let's look at them and see which one might be right for you.
| Criterion | Microservices | Monolithic |
|---|---|---|
| Structure | Divides the application into small, loosely coupled and independent services | Builds the application as a single, indivisible unit |
| Development | Enables independent development and deployment of services | All components are interconnected, therefore they must be developed together |
| Scalability | Individual components can be scaled as needed | The entire application must scale even if just one function has increased demand |
| Technology Stack | Each service can use a different technology stack | All components must use the same technology stack |
| Implantation | Enables continuous deployment and integration | The entire application needs to be redeployed for updates |
| Mandatory isolation | Failure in one service does not affect others | A single error can bring down the entire application |
| Performance | High performance and speed due to light duty | Performance depends on application size and complexity |
| Data management | Each service can have its own database | A single database is used for the entire application |
| Complexity | More complex due to distributed system challenges | Less complex initially, but can become difficult to manage over time |
| Development speed | Initially slower due to the need for careful planning | Faster initially due to simplicity |
| Modification | Easier to update or add new features without disrupting other services | Updates or modifications may require system-wide changes |
| Testing and debugging | Easier to test and debug specific services independently | Testing and debugging can be more challenging due to application interconnectivity |
| Communication between services | Services communicate through APIs, which can add latency | Components interact directly, generally offering lower latency |
Monolithic architecture
We start with monolithic because it is the simplest to understand. Why? Because monolithic architecture has been around for a long time. In fact, monolithic applications are what most people understand as “software.”
Simply put, a monolithic application is one created as a single unit, although this does not necessarily mean that everything is included to make that application run. Let's break it down so we can better understand what's going on.
Yes, there are applications installed as standalone clients. Take, for example, an office suite like LibreOffice . This application does not depend on any external or third-party software or services to run. Everything runs on the local client machine.
On the other hand, the WordPress blogging platform requires the following to function:
- A database server
- A server-side application
- A client-side user interface
Each of these components is monolithic and works together to create the whole.
Confused? Let's simplify by looking from the developer's perspective.
Let's say your company has implemented a monolithic content management system developed in-house. This system includes a database, a server-side application, and a client-side user interface. It works perfectly and your team depends on it every day.
At some point, however, your developers want to add new functionality to the server-side component. To do this, developers will have to rebuild and redeploy the entire server-side application. While the end result may be worth the effort, it takes considerable time to go through the entire development process (design, development, Q&A testing, and deployment).
Microservices architecture
Now let's look at microservices architecture. While a monolithic application is contained in a single unit, microservices divide it into a collection of much smaller independent units. Each of these units functions to serve all application services which then combine as a unified whole.
One of the best examples of microservices architecture is containers.
You could deploy an NGINX server as a monolithic service. Install NGINX on a Linux server and you are ready to serve your websites. You could add a database to the mix by installing Maria DB . There are, however, two major problems with such a deployment.
First, if you want to upgrade your web server, you must upgrade each component as a whole – the web server and the database. Secondly, this type of deployment may not be able to scale to meet the needs of the company.
The other route would be to deploy this web server as a collection of microservices, via containers. You can deploy a Kubernetes pod containing the NGINX web server, a pod containing the database, and then connect them to a network service and a storage volume to store data.
When you need to scale up your deployment, Kubernetes can automatically deploy more NGINX and MariaDB containers to the cluster.
In addition to scalability, one of the best features of microservices architecture is that if one of the services fails, another will be deployed in its place. So failover is built in. And since all of its components are deployed independently, the upgrade outlook is much smoother. This is especially true with containers, where upgrade-induced downtime is almost non-existent.
Which is best for your company?
This can be answered quite simply:
- If your company needs high scalability, failover, and reliability, you need to use a microservices architecture.
- If your business requires primarily client-based tools (installed on desktops) or if you don't consider enterprise-wide horizontal expansion, monolithic architecture is the best option.
The warning
This comes with a caveat. Microservices architecture is not that easy to deploy. Kubernetes is challenging on almost every conceivable level. So if you're interested in microservices architecture, make sure you have developers and IT administrators up to the task, otherwise you'll find yourself in a constant state of troubleshooting.
Additionally, to have a successful microservices deployment, you need resources. To truly take advantage of the scalability of microservices, you need a data center with enough power to handle this architecture. Most often this means deploying to a third-party cloud host such as AmazonAWS , Google Cloud , Linode , Rackspace , or Microsoft Azure . Unless you have a really impressive on-premises data center, you won't achieve the levels of scale that you would with one of these hosts.
In the end, the choice is yours. But for most companies looking to grow far beyond what they've already achieved, microservices are the way forward.
Source: BairesDev
