Microservice benefits

While the microservices architecture looks more complicated than its monolithic counterpart, its advantages are multiple. It offers the following:

• Separation of concerns
• Smaller projects to deal with
• More scaling and deployment options

We will discuss them in more detail in the following sections.

Separation of concerns

First of all, each microservice can be developed independently by a separate team. For instance, building a reservation service can be a full project on its own. The team in charge can make it in whatever programming language and database, as long as it has a well-documented HTTP API.

That also means the evolution of the app is more under control than with monoliths. For example, if the payment system changes its underlying interactions with the bank, the impact is localized inside that service, and the rest of the application stays stable and is probably unaffected.

This loose coupling improves the overall project velocity a lot, as we apply, at the service level, a philosophy similar to the single responsibility principle.

The single responsibility principle was defined by Robert Martin to explain that a class should have only one reason to change; in other words, each class should provide a single, well-defined feature. Applied to microservices, it means that we want to make sure that each microservice focuses on a single role.

Smaller projects

The second benefit is breaking the complexity of the project. When you add a feature to an application such as PDF reporting, even if you do it cleanly, you make the base code bigger, more complicated, and sometimes, slower. Building that feature in a separate application avoids this problem, and makes it easier to write it with whatever tools you want. You can refactor it often, shorten your release cycles, and stay on top of things. The growth of the application remains under your control.

Dealing with a smaller project also reduces risks when improving the application: if a team wants to try out the latest programming language or framework, they can iterate quickly on a prototype that implements the same microservice API, try it out, and decide whether or not to stick with it.

One real-life example in mind is the Firefox Sync storage microservice. There are currently some experiments to switch from the current Python + MySQL implementation to a Go-based one, which stores users' data in standalone SQLite databases. That prototype is highly experimental, but since we have isolated the storage feature in a microservice with a well-defined HTTP API, it's easy enough to give it a try with a small subset of the user base.

Scaling and deployment

Finally, having your application split into components makes it easier to scale depending on your constraints. Let's say you start getting a lot of customers who book hotels daily, and the PDF generation starts to heat up the CPUs. You can deploy that specific microservice in some servers that have bigger CPUs.

Another typical example are RAM-consuming microservices like the ones that interact with memory databases like Redis or Memcache. You could tweak your deployments, consequently, by deploying them on servers with less CPU and a lot more RAM.

We can, thus, summarize the benefits of microservices as follows:

• A team can develop each microservice independently, and use whatever technological stack makes sense. They can define a custom release cycle. All they need to define is a language-agnostic HTTP API.
• Developers break the application complexity into logical components. Each microservice focuses on doing one thing well.
• Since microservices are standalone applications, there's a finer control on deployments, which makes scaling easier.

The microservices architecture is good at solving a lot of the problems that may arise once your application starts to grow. However, we need to be aware of some of the new issues they also bring in practice.