Advertisement

Navigating Growth Challenges with Microservices

By on
Read more about author Venugopal Thati.

Within the digital marketplace, it is impossible for businesses and organizations to thrive without staying current with the latest technologies. As digitization grows, so does the tech-centric reliance from global enterprises in automating and adapting their workflows to expand their businesses more efficiently. One of the fastest-growing solutions for ensuring enterprise-wide efficiency across multiple systems is the implementation of a microservices architecture. Recent market research predicts that the microservices architecture sector will grow from $5.59 billion in 2022 to $21.61 billion by 2030.

Microservices are a collection of services that work together to provide a set of functional features for an application. While it has remained a staple for over a decade, many companies struggle to implement an architecture seamlessly and successfully. That’s because extensive planning and organization are required before fully implementing and adopting this technology throughout the business. Because of their numerous functions and services, microservices can seem daunting without a fluent understanding of their many purposes. Deployment and maintenance are no simple tasks and often require professional assistance. Before a business can consider a microservices architecture of its own, it needs to understand the multiple details and factors that contribute to falling on the successful side of a statistic.

Scope and Growth of Microservices Architectures

Global organizations are increasingly interested in microservices architectures and their many cloud-based functionalities. As the numbers continue to rise, their place in the market shows no signs of halting. Microservices serve as an instrumental development for creating multiple effective applications simultaneously within an enterprise. Cloud-based arrangements such as software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) drive the marketplace with multiple everyday products. Tablets, cell phones, drones, health trackers, and other devices accomplish simple microservices tasks for users daily. 

Market research and recent trends predict an estimated 18.66% compound annual growth in the microservices architecture industry by 2030. Businesses that invest in virtual infrastructures with cloud service providers are reaping the many benefits of deployment, including reduced risk, heightened performance, and cost efficiency. Microservices simplify several operational and administrative processes, making them a hot commodity for modern businesses. Its positive impact on innovation and production for so many industries cannot be overstated, with beneficial factors including:

  • Maintenance is simplified when microservices applications are broken down into specialized components, allowing focused concentration on specific parts without disrupting the whole.
  • Due to the relatively small size and simple coding of a microservices infrastructure, it is easy for developers to understand it from the inside out instead of struggling to comprehend an intimidatingly massive system.
  • Unlike monolithic architectures, where one impactful blow can destroy the entire system, microservices are protected through isolation. If there is a memory leak or security breach, it only affects one service without disrupting the overall workflow.
  • Individual microservices from an application can be scaled independently to meet the growing demand. This helps organizations to reduce costs rather than scaling an entire application.

The Challenges and Struggles of Microservices 

 While microservices deliver numerous benefits after an effective deployment, there are difficulties and challenges. These common obstacles include: 

  • Since microservices are small and isolated, it’s easier to create complex connections between them to create an application. Because the system is distributed, the optimization process requires substantial time and effort.
  • Self-contained services have several moving parts. This makes managing these individual systems difficult for developers. Rather than monitoring one extensive system, they are forced to watch over several smaller services simultaneously.
  • Implementing multi-service requests can be overwhelming. Poor communication and coordination lead to an inadequate system and operational flow.
  • When no proper functional boundaries are defined between microservices, changes for a particular feature can spread across multiple services and teams. This leads to a lengthy development lifecycle and increased costs.

Ensuring an effective microservices implementation means confirming everyone is on the same page. Clear and consistent communication among developers is essential to maintaining these complex, contained service systems. Proficiently leveraging a microservices architecture can simplify workflow while reducing organizational costs and administrative efforts. This is only possible if appropriately handled by the developers. 

Overcoming Microservice Obstacles 

One of the main ways to overcome the common pitfalls when implementing microservices is to fully understand its technology and available options. It is important to view the technology from the perspective of observability, which involves capturing the various interactions when making requests for these microservices and correlating them accordingly. Understanding how a request is fulfilled with a service and how the contained systems communicate with one another helps users recognize the source of a potential failure or incident immediately.

Another aspect of understanding microservices architectures is recognizing the available options and selecting the right technology. Running microservices in production requires an easily scalable infrastructure, such as container orchestration systems offered by these cloud-native technologies. It’s essential to spend time and resources when deciding the deployment methodology and runtime environment to execute microservices successfully in production. As organizations grow, they often create a monolithic infrastructure in which each application’s programmed functions and coding are uniformly woven together. This puts the structure at risk as it grows larger and more complex while remaining unified. Changing or adding a single feature to one application can disrupt the coding of the entire system. For this reason, businesses implement microservices to divide the monolith into small, independent microservices that are not reliant on each other. When doing so, it is critical for the developers to properly divide and create these services and applications into a cohesive architecture that best accommodates their needs and improves the overall workflow. This requires planning, programming, and innovation before the full deployment. When an architecture is properly implemented, the organization can seamlessly upgrade or adjust one application without worry of disrupting another, resulting in easier maintenance and management.

Real-Life Applications and the Future of Microservices 

Many of the most well-known corporations in the world have leveraged microservices to enhance their user/customer experience and grow their businesses. Amazon runs multiple operations simultaneously to ensure consumers receive a seamless experience optimized to meet their needs. This requires a heavy workload from users and developers when managing all these functions and proceedings through numerous application programming interfaces (APIs). Microservices handle each feature accordingly to streamline decision-making and ensure speedy delivery of the desired product. 

According to a recent study, microservices are so widely used that 86% of developers worldwide predict that they will replace traditional application design as the standard within five years. Because microservices continuously outperform traditional monolithic infrastructures, they show a promising future with a prominent role in the marketplace. Through enhanced modularity, scalability, and maintainability, microservices architectures suit the current and future needs of a digital, fast-paced world. They allow developers to concentrate on one issue at a time with quicker development and delivery than ever before. 

Microservices architectures can help an organization grow and develop when implemented proficiently. Before adopting such an integrative technology, a deep knowledge of its benefits and challenges is necessary. While microservices can improve an organization, challenges can result from a failed implementation. Microservices is a harvest for clean communication and a simplified workflow, but the developed framework must fit a company’s specific needs and intricacies.