The ‘2022 Service Mesh Adoption Survey’ indicates that 85% of companies are upgrading their systems to microservices. How is monolithic application development becoming obsolete? Efficiency, flexibility, and minimizing risk are three qualities that characterize this now not-so-novel approach to software development. However, there are a vast number of systems or applications in the IT world that, unlike microservices, have been produced as one giant monolith, or in other words, a monolithic block. This should come as no surprise to anyone working in DevOps or development; quite the contrary. Microservices, as opposed to a monolithic architecture, allow easy adaptation to rapidly changing business requirements.
Above all, the loosely-connected microservices that make up the whole system mean simpler, faster, and more frequent deployments. Thanks to this architecture, we don’t have to deploy everything, only those services that have been tweaked. Saving time, resources, and, consequently, budget – the business will be delighted. Microservices also promote the scalability of systems. Only those that require more computing power can be adapted.
Having isolated services makes testing easier, not to mention the benefits, since they are visible both from a technical as well as a business standpoint. One issue that is particularly relevant to us is that potential bugs are isolated to individual microservices, so we don’t have to search for the source of problems across the entire (often massive) system.
It may seem, especially after reading the above praise, that there aren’t any disadvantages. Paradoxically, microservice flaws do exist, but they reveal themselves when we do not approach architecture development with a vision and a plan. Design for fail should set the direction of software development, and the design team should be interdisciplinary. When implementing microservices, one more thing is worth bearing in mind – common sense. Microservice architecture is unnecessary for simple applications or in the initial phases of project development (e.g., Proof of Concept). We’re unlikely to see any advantages there, and it will only lead to unnecessary (at this point) complications.
The IT world got to know Kubernetes nine years ago when Google opened it up as an open-source project, so this is no news. Over this time, Kubernetes has grown exponentially, and companies are increasingly moving their workloads to this platform. However, when it comes to adopting this technology in organizations, there is still huge potential, just as there is for microservice architecture. The upward trend will continue – cloud business is the future trend, but it is also a present one.
Some benefits of k8s out-of-the-box:
As the name implies, this is a way of creating services or applications without having to deal with (or, even better, worry about) the servers on which they run. Public cloud providers (Google Cloud Platform, AWS, Azure) have several services that allow you to run your code as an individual function or a whole container.
This approach allows:
It is estimated that the serverless computing market will reach USD 21 billion in 2025 and USD 30 billion in 2030, compared to just USD 7.5 billion in 2020.
Broad-based DevOps technologies, including microservices, are evolving at a dizzying pace to meet the demands placed on them by businesses.
DevOps’ popularity is attributed to several factors, including:
Microservices and related technologies can ease the process of meeting business requirements and encourage the development of systems or organizations that adopt them in-house.
