A microservice architecture decomposes an application into loosely coupled, independently deployable services that own their data and communicate through lightweight protocols. It breaks down large applications into smaller, self-contained business capabilities, enabling faster development, easier scaling, and better fault tolerance. Microservices enable continuous delivery and agile development by allowing teams to independently build, test, and deploy features. You can imagine an application as an orchestra, where each microservice is a musician playing their part, but in perfect harmony with the others, to create a beautiful symphony.

What we’ve just mentioned sounds like a silver bullet but as you know, nothing is free and there is no one-size-fits-all solution to the problems we face. The same applies to microservices.

We, as software developers, love to learn new trends and try to apply them to our practice. But after delving into the details...

Say we have an e-commerce site with a single code base that was developed years ago. Over time, features and functionalities were added randomly, leading to messy code that contains duplication, is hard to maintain, and is difficult to troubleshoot. Here is the first suggested transition so that you can make your application responsive or alive again:

• Analyze the current state of your application: You need to identify key pain points affecting developer productivity and user experience. Try to divide the problem into smaller pieces. Trying to cover everything at once will lead you to more difficulties. Focus on specific modules or functionalities within the larger code base for initial refactoring. You need to understand dependencies, duplication, and complexity in your application.
• Communication and collaborative planning: The next steps are identifying the areas for improvement and agreeing on common architectural principles. Emphasize...

A monolithic architecture unifies all of the components/elements – including the user interface and data access – into a single code base, promoting simplicity and quick development. Although it’s not impossible, combining different technologies into one system can be difficult to maintain and unfeasible at times. In the absence of contemporary methodologies such as feature flags and blue-green deployment, it becomes necessary to deploy the entire application every time you want to update a monolithic application. There are difficulties with organizing and delivering the application smoothly, which could mess up its launch.

On the other hand, SOA (see Figure 1.4) focuses on modularity and reuse, breaking down functionalities into independent services that communicate with each other through application programming interfaces (APIs).

SOA can be defined as multiple, smaller, and often coarser-grained services, each with...

Microservices architecture simplifies building distributed, flexible, and scalable software. Instead of one monolithic system, it divides an application into small, standalone services, each of them focused on a specific task. These services communicate through simple interfaces, allowing for independent deployment and easy integration. When developing properly designed microservices, we get loosely coupled, reusable, extensible, and easily maintainable applications.

When comparing microservices to SOA, they may seem similar in concept. SOA and microservices architecture are both architectural styles that are used for building distributed systems, but they have some key differences. Let’s compare them:

• Scope and granularity: Services in SOA are like big boxes containing multiple functionalities that are meant to be reused across different applications. Microservices are like tiny, specialized tools, each focusing on one...

In this section, we’ll look at the many reasons that make microservices an important part of software development:

• Scalability: You can scale each microservice independently based on demand, ensuring resources are allocated where needed for optimal performance and cost-effectiveness.
• Flexibility and agility: Teams can work on different services simultaneously, speeding up development and making updates easier. Being agile is essential to adapting to the ever-shifting demands and markets of businesses.
• Fault isolation: If one microservice fails, it doesn’t necessarily affect others, thanks to their independence. This isolation improves system reliability by minimizing downtime.
• Technology diversity: Multiple programming languages and technologies can be used in a single application thanks to microservices. Teams are encouraged to explore and be creative by selecting the finest tools for each service.
• Easy maintenance...

Throughout this chapter, we learned that the main reason for having various architectures in software development is a sign that there is no single truth and that depending on the requirements, architecture may vary. Every approach in design has its disadvantages and before applying any architecture, you should carefully analyze and understand them.

Here are some important disadvantages of microservices:

• Increased complexity in development: Breaking down a system into smaller services can lead to increased complexity in development, deployment, and testing.
• Interservice communication: Managing communication between microservices can become complex, requiring careful design and implementation of APIs and protocols.
• Infrastructure complexity: Managing and deploying a large number of microservices can introduce operational overhead, including the need for sophisticated orchestration and monitoring tools.
• Infrastructure cost: The overhead...

This chapter introduced you to microservices. We talked about coding without proper design and analysis, which brings us to a big ball of mud. Having no clear architecture is similar to having no map in the middle of the ocean.

Our first step was starting with monoliths. We talked about the advantages and disadvantages of the monolith approach and tried to understand the differences between approach and architecture.

Nowadays, requirements for applications are broader and more complex, and always trying to deal with them using a monolith approach may not be a good solution. To add important attributes, such as “distributed,” to the architecture, we considered SOA while discussing its pros and cons.

The final destination for us was microservices. We provided a clear definition for it and tried to understand the advantages and disadvantages of using them.

Microservices bring a lot of interesting challenges to our lives and one of them is communication...