Microservices in the current world

Now, let's look at the pioneer implementers of microservices in the current world, the advantages they have got, and the roadmap ahead. The common objective of why these companies adopted microservices was getting rid of monolithic hell. Microservices even saw its adoption at the frontend. Companies such as Zalando use microservices principles to have composition at the UI level too.

Netflix

Netflix is one of the front-runners in microservice adoption. Netflix processes billions of viewing events per day. It needed a robust and scalable architecture to manage and process this data. Netflix used polyglot persistence to get the strength of each of the technological solutions they adopted. They used Cassandra for high volume and lower latency writes operations and a hand-made model with tuned configurations for medium volume write operations. They have Redis for high volume and lower latency reads at the cache level. Several frameworks that Netflix tailor-made are now open source and available for use:

Netflix Zuul	An edge server or the gatekeeper to the outside world. It doesn't allow unauthorized requests to pass through. It is the only point of contact for the outside world.
Netflix Ribbon	A load balancer that is used by service consumers to find services at runtime. If more than one instances of microservices are found, ribbon uses load balancing to evenly distribute the load.
Netflix Hystrix	A circuit breaker that is used to keep the system up and running. Hystrix breaks the connection for services that are going to fail eventually and only joins the connection when services are up again.
Netflix Eureka	Used for service discovery and registration. It allows services to register themselves at runtime.
Netflix Turbine	Monitoring tool to check the health of running microservices.

 

Just checking the stars on these repositories will give an idea of the rate of adoption of microservices using Netflix's tools.

Walmart

Walmart is one of the most popular companies on Black Friday. During Black Friday, it has more than 6 million page views per minute. Walmart adopted to microservices architecture to adopt to the world of 2020 to have 100% availability with reasonable costs. Migrating to microservices gave a huge uplift to the company. Conversion rates went up by 20%. They have zero downtime on Black Friday. They saved 40% of their computational power and got 20-50% cost savings overall.

Spotify

Spotify has 75 million active users per month with an average session length of 23 minutes. They adopted a microservice architecture and polyglot environment. Spotify is a company of 90 teams, 600 developers, and five offices across two continents, all working on the same product. This was a major factor in reducing dependencies as much as possible.

Zalando

Zalando implemented microservices at the frontend. They introduced fragments that served as separate services for the frontend. Fragments can be composed together at runtime as per the template definitions provided. Similar to Netflix, they have outsourced usage libraries:

Tailor	It's a layout service, which composes a page out of various fragments, as it does asynchronous and streams based fetching it has outstanding time to the first byte (TTFB).
Skipper	HTTP router for communication, more of an HTTP interceptor, it has the ability to modify request and responses with filters.
Shaker	UI components library used for providing consistent user experience while developing fragments across multiple teams.
Quilt	Template storage and manager with REST API.
Innkeeper	Datastores for routes.
Tesselate	Server-side renderer and component tree builder.

 

It now serves more than 1500 fashion brands, generates more than $3.43 billion revenue, and developments are done in a team of more than 700 people.

In the next section, we will debunk microservices from the design point of view. We will see what components are involved in the microservices design and see widely prevalent microservices design patterns.