Setup your architecture for the future with microservices
In order to build a microservices architecture, one needs to have microservices first. But what are microservices? In its essence, microservices are small, autonom software applications that focus on doing one thing well. From a software application development perspective, they are nothing special. It is the school of thought that defines microservices - shaping their resulting scope and characteristics.
Thinking in microservices fights against the challenges and problems experienced by many organizations when developing monolithic applications. Even with good development practices in place, large monolithic codebases can make it extremely difficult to actively drive further development, incorporate new features and adapt to changes. Where do new features have to be implemented? Does similar functionality already exist? Which parts of the application are coupled and need changes? Development might become increasingly difficult and complex that large monolithic applications stagnate or even freeze in progress.
Microservices are small independent services that have service boundaries aligned with respect to business boundaries. These explicit boundaries keep them from growing out of their scope. Microservices are autonomous services which can be seen as independent entities. They can be developed and deployed independently from each other. This results in many and diverse benefits, which have their foundation in distributed systems. Key benefits include:
Now we have seen and understood the benefits of microservices and are keen to get started. But how do we structure software applications into small, autonomous services? What do we have to consider? Two key aspects of what makes a good microservice are loose coupling and high cohesion - two aspects which are highly related to the overall architecture we are aiming for.
Setting up our customer projects according to the cloud-native approach helps us to develop complex systems quickly and efficiently and to implement short, efficient release cycles. The following projects are a small excerpt from our past cloudnative projects.