Microservices architecture to the rescue

We saw the problems caused by monolithic architecture. These problems lead developers to switch from monolithic architecture to microservices architecture.

In microservices architecture, the server-side application is divided into services. A service (or microservice) is a small and independent process that constitutes a particular functionality of the complete server-side application. For example, you can have a service for payment processing, another service for account management, and so on; the services need to communicate with each other via a network.

Tip

What do you mean by "small" service?

You must be wondering how small a service needs to be and how to tell whether a service is small or not. Well, it actually depends on many factors such as the type of application, team management, availability of resources, size of application, and how small you think is small. However, a small service doesn't have to be the one that is written is fewer lines of code or provides a very basic functionality. A small service can be the one on which a team of developers can work independently, which can be scaled independently to other services, scaling it doesn't cause unbalanced utilization of recourses, and overall they are highly decoupled (independent and unaware) of other services.

You don't have to run each service in a different server, that is, you can run multiple services in a single computer. The ratio of server to services depends on different factors. A common factor is the amount and type of resources and technologies required. For example, if a service needs a lot of RAM and CPU time, then it would be better to run it individually on a server. If there are some services that don't need much resources, then you can run them all in a single server together.

The following diagram shows an example of the microservices architecture:

Here, you can think of Service 1 as the web server with which a browser communicates and other services providing APIs for various functionalities. The web services communicate with other services to get data.

Merits of microservices architecture

Due to the fact that services are small and independent and communicate via network, microservices architecture solves many problems that monolithic architecture had. Here are some of the benefits of microservices architecture:

• As the services communicate via a network, they can be written in different programming languages using different frameworks
• Making a change to a service only requires that particular service to be redeployed instead of all the services, which is a faster procedure
• It becomes easier to measure how much resources are consumed by each service as each service runs in a different process
• It becomes easier to test and debug, as you can analyze each service separately
• Services can be reused by other applications as they interact via network calls

Scaling services

Apart from the preceding benefits, one of the major benefits of microservices architecture is that you can scale individual services that require scaling instead of all the services, therefore preventing duplication of resources and unbalanced utilization of resources.

Suppose we want to scale Service 1 in the preceding diagram. Here is a diagram that shows how it can be scaled:

Here, we are running two instances of Service 1 on two different servers kept behind a load balancer, which distributes the traffic between them. All other services run the same way, as scaling them wasn't required. If you wanted to scale Service 3, then you can run multiple instances of Service 3 on multiple servers and place them behind a load balancer.

Demerits of microservices architecture

Although there are a lot of merits of using microservices architecture compared to monolithic architecture, there are some demerits of microservices architecture as well:

• As the server-side application is divided into services, deploying, and optionally, configuring each service separately is a cumbersome and time-consuming task.

  Note

  Note that developers often use some sort automation technology (such as AWS, Docker, and so on) to make deployment somewhat easier; however, to use it, you still need a good level of experience and expertise with that technology.

• Communication between services is likely to lag as it's done via a network.
• This sort of server-side applications more prone to network security vulnerabilities as services communicate via a network.
• Writing code for communicating with other services can be harder, that is, you need to make network calls and then parse the data to read it. This also requires more processing. Note that although there are frameworks to build server-side applications using microservices that make fetching and parsing data easier, it still doesn't deduct the processing and network wait time.
• You will surely need some sort of monitoring tool to monitor services as they may go down due to network, hardware, or software failure. Although you may use the monitoring tool only when your application suddenly stops, to build the monitoring software or use some sort of service, monitoring software needs some level of extra experience and expertise.
• Microservices-based server-side applications are slower than monolithic-based server-side applications as communication via networks is slower compared to memory.

When to use microservices architecture

It may seem like its difficult to choose between monolithic and microservices architecture, but it's actually not so hard to decide between them.

If you are building a server-side application using monolithic architecture and you feel that you are unlikely to face any monolithic issues that we discussed earlier, then you can stick to monolithic architecture. In future, if you are facing issues that can be solved using microservices architecture, then you should switch to microservices architecture.

If you are switching from a monolithic architecture to microservices architecture, then you don't have to rewrite the complete application, instead you can only convert the components that are causing issues to services by doing some code refactoring. This sort of server-side applications where the main application logic is monolithic but some specific functionality is exposed via services is called microservices architecture with monolithic core. As issues increase further, you can start converting more components of the monolithic core to services.

If you are building a server-side application using monolithic architecture and you feel that you are likely to face any of the monolithic issues that we discussed earlier, then you should immediately switch to microservices architecture or microservices architecture with monolithic core, depending on what suits you the best.

Data management

In microservices architecture, each service can have its own database to store data and can also use a centralized database.

Some developers don't use a centralized database at all, instead all services have their own database to store the data. To synchronize the data between the services, the services omit events when their data is changed and other services subscribe to the event and update the data. The problem with this mechanism is that if a service is down, then it may miss some events. There is also going to be a lot of duplicate data, and finally, it is difficult to code this kind of system.

Therefore, it's a good idea to have a centralized database and also let each service to maintain their own database if they want to store something that they don't want to share with others. Services should not connect to the centralized database directly, instead there should be another service called database service that provides APIs to work with the centralized database. This extra layer has many advantages, such as the underlying schema can be changed without updating and redeploying all the services that are dependent on the schema, we can add a caching layer without making changes to the services, you can change the type of database without making any changes to the services and there are many other benefits. We can also have multiple database services if there are multiple schemas, or if there are different types of database, or due to some other reason that benefits the overall architecture and decouples the services.