How to Determine if Microservices Architecture Is Right for Your Business

Two types of widespread architecture exist in the market - Monolithic architecture and microservices architecture. While the latter is getting widespread recognition in the IT industry, does that mean you should jump into microservices architecture adoption? Is it the right solution for your business? This article will help you understand the core concepts of both the architecture to make an informed decision regarding the choice of architecture for your business. 

What Is Monolithic Architecture?

Monolithic architecture puts all the functionalities of the software into a single codebase. The codebase, usually, is internally divided into layers, namely the presentation layer, business logic layer, and database layer. This codebase, consisting of layers, is deployed as a single jar/war file.

This encapsulation of modules within a single codebase results in a tightly coupled architecture. Furthermore, it leads to a specific set of advantages and disadvantages that we’ll discuss in subsequent sections and the ideal use cases.

What Is Microservices Architecture?

In a microservices architecture, functionalities and business capabilities are broken down into individual modules called microservices. Each microservice has its database, communicates with other microservices through API endpoints and HTTP protocols, and can be developed independently.

With separate databases for individual microservice, data duplication is a common occurrence. However, the loose coupling of modules brings about a lot of operational flexibility for teams and individual developers. 

Questions to Ask Before Choosing Microservices Architecture

To determine the right architecture for your business, you should be familiar with your business from the inside out and know the answers to the following questions.

Question 1: What Are You Trying to Accomplish by Adopting Microservices Architecture?

Despite the popular belief that microservice is the way to go, managing many distributed systems could prove to overall for many organizations. Therefore, before implementing anything, it is crucial to assess whether the problems faced by the current architecture are solvable via microservices or not?

Question 2: Does Your Organization Have the Budget to Invest in Microservices?

It takes a tremendous amount of time and effort to migrate from one architecture to another. Making such huge changes could easily go for a couple of years. Without necessary calculations, massive architectural changes could cost you more due to complexities and productivity challenges.

Question 3: Do You Have an Experienced Team of Developers to Work on Distributed Systems?

Working on distributed systems is not an easy task. One needs to take care of monitoring, networking, event-driven architecture, containers, and middleware that demands specialized skills and expertise. Even with proper architectural guidelines, implementing them still pose a significant challenge.

Benefits of Microservices Architecture

Shorter time to market - It takes between a few months to a couple of years to develop and deploy monolithic applications. On the contrary, microservices applications are divided into smaller chunks, and each service is developed by a team of developers working simultaneously on the same project. Due to this, it takes less time to build the application from scratch.

Scalability - Scaling a monolithic application is a monstrous process. For scaling, you need to redeploy the entire application. The process is extremely expensive and time-consuming.  

Microservices architecture offers the flexibility to scale your application at your own will. You can scale any particular service that is under load. As the whole application is not scaled in one go, you potentially save a lot in hosting costs. 

Easier updates - Consumers in this era of digitalization expect their experience to evolve with time. It is crucial for your application to be updated and upgraded with time to meet the demands. As microservices are a collaborative cluster of services, upgrading them doesn’t prove problematic. 

On top of it, numerous tools in microservices architecture are from third-party vendors. So maintaining and managing them are outside your boundaries. However, it's usually managed by the vendors themselves, and you don’t have to do anything about it. 

Conclusion

Microservices indeed have many-fold advantages. Many reputed organizations like Amazon and Netflix have switched to microservices and have delivered outstanding results.  But you shouldn’t be hasty to make an uninformed decision.

Choose microservices if :

• You are dealing with scalability issues

• Specific applications need to be reused between different business applications

• If your application requires frequent updates

Don’t choose microservices if

• Your business application is not dealing with complex issues that justify architectural changes.

• Your team size is not adequate to handle distributed systems.

• You lack the finances to make architectural changes.