What are Microservices in Digital Transformation?

Today’s organizations are feeling the fear of becoming dinosaur every day. New disrupters are coming into your industry and turning everything upside down.

Customers are more demanding than ever and will abandon the service that is too slow to respond.  Everything is needed yesterday to make your customers happy.

Now, there is no time for organizations to implement huge enterprise applications which takes months and years. 

What they need is, more agile, smaller, hyper focused teams working together to innovate and provide customer value.

This is where Microservices have gain momentum and are becoming fast go-to solution for enterprises. They takes SOA a step further by breaking every component into effectively single-purpose applications.

Microservices, show a strategy for decomposing a large project, based on the functions, into smaller, more manageable pieces. While a monolithic app is One Big Program with many responsibilities, Microservice based apps are composed of several small programs, each with a single responsibility

Microservices are independently developed & deployable, small, modular services. Each component is developed separately, and the application is then simply the sum of its constituent components. Each service runs as a unique process and communicates with other components via a very lightweight methods like HTTP/Rest with Jason.

Unlike old single huge enterprise application which requires heavy maintenance, Microservices are easy to manage.

Here are few characteristics and advantages of Microservices:

• Very small, targeted in scope and functionality
• Gives developers the freedom to independently develop and deploy services
• Loosely coupled & can communicate with other services on industry wide standards like HTTP and JSON
• API based connectivity
• Every service can be coded in different programming language
• Easily deployable and disposable makes releases possible even multiple times a day
• New Digital technology can be easily adopted for a service
• Allows to change services as required by business, without a massive cost
• Testing and releases easier for individual components
• Better fault tolerance and scale up

There are some challenges as well, while using Microservices:

• Incur a cost of the testing at system integration level
• Need to configure monitoring and alerting and similar services for each microservice
• Service calls to one another, so tracing the path and debugging can be difficult
• Each service communicates through API/remote calls, which have more overhead
• Each service generates a log, so there is no central log monitoring.

Netflix has great Microservice architecture that receives more than one billion calls every day, from more than 800 different types of devices, to its streaming-video API.

Nike, the athlete clothing and shoe giant & now digital brand is using Microservices in its apps to deliver extra ordinary customer experience.

Amazon, eBay are other great examples of Microservices architecture.

GE’s Predix - the industrial Internet platform is based on Microservices architecture.

So, if your IT organization is implementing a microservices architecture, here are some examples of an operating system (Linux, Ubuntu, CoreOS), container technology(Docker), a scheduler(Swarm, Kubernetes), and a monitoring tool(Prometheus).

The technical demands of digital transformation, all front/back-office systems that seamlessly coordinate customer experiences in a digital world is achieved by Microservices as the preferred architecture.

Microservices help close the gap between business and IT & are fundamental shift in how IT approaches software development and are absolutely essential in Digital Transformation.