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Microservices Agile Software Driving Business Value

Microservices Agile Software Driving Business Value
Microservices Agile Software Driving Business Value
Microservices Agile Software Driving Business Value

Microservices Agile Software Driving Business Value

Gone are the days when the software industry relied on building and deploying single-tiered monolithic applications. Today, micro-services is the leading architectural pattern for building enterprise applications that require high agility, modularity, and scalability.

In today’s world, adaptability to technology is a vital ingredient for the innovation and continuous success of businesses. We hope the knowledge of micro-services will lay you a foundation to evolve your business to the next step.

What is Micro-service?

Microservices is an architecture designed as a pool of loosely coupled, single task-oriented services. When these services are structured together, they can solve a large, complex business problem.

The service units that build up the micro-services architecture are highly maintainable, testable, and independently deployable. They use Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to communicate with each other. So, agile software programmers have the freedom to write services in different languages using divergent technologies. Because of that, micro-services can be easily applied to DevOps and Agile work environments that modern software project management is heading today.

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Micro-services Agile Software: Into the Background

The concept of microservices architecture first premiered in 2011. However, the ‘concept of separating’ applications was still there with programming paradigms such as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) since the ’90s.

Indeed, both the architectures carry similar characteristics. The differentiating factor is the scope. The Service-Oriented Architecture is an enterprise-wide paradigm across a suite of applications. Whereas, micro-services architecture is limited to the scope of developing a single application. So, there is a high possibility that you feel you already knew microservices architecture and feel like it has already been adopted into your production system. But, in reality, maybe not yet.

Monolithic to Micro-services Strategy

Even within an SOA architecture, we all used to have monolithic applications before introducing the microservices strategy. So, we need to shift from monolithic to micro-services paradigm to develop new applications as well as to revamp legacy applications to micro-services architecture.

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Frequently Asked Questions

A Microservice is the breaking up of traditionally tightly coupled application components into small specialized services that communicate through HTTPS REST and HTTPS API interfaces.
Since Microservices are small specialized services, they can be quickly and efficiently rearranged to accommodate future capabilities unknown at the present time.
Microservices are independent and modular which allows for significant flexibility in communications patterns and often prevent cascading failure.
DevOps is the combination of development and operations into a single function of software development and infrastructure management. The main priority of DevOps is the reduction of barriers to speed of delivery.
DevSecOps empowers everyone in the development process using a security focused tool set to address timely security decisions at speed and scale of each development stage. The main priority of DevSecOps is risk reduction through DevOps security accountability and governance.
Security automation in DevSecOps increases speed of code releases while reducing the risk using static application security testing (SAST), dynamic application security testing (DAST), and code dependency checking.
High business value is realized from quick and efficient response to market opportunities and challenges, optimization for innovation, and reduction of technical debt all lead to superior competitive advantage.
CCT is pleased to discuss your requirements and present a proposal for your review and consideration. Call us today at 1-800-804-9726 x105.

Five Pro Tips to Implement Microservices Business Value Strategy

1. Never rush; set goals and start small

Like any other technology transition, moving from a monolithic codebase to a microservices architecture should follow a pilot project. But, your pilot project should not be a key business application directly affecting your key business operation, nor should be a complete application.
A monolithic architecture builds up of a web of repositories involving complex tasks in a single unit. So, decoupling and changing the whole codebase at once may be an exasperating task for the developers. And, if the team lacks exposure to the microservices architecture could even leave behind errors and gaps that can lead to far critical issues to application failures.
So, start your pilot project with a minor horizontal application. Except for migrating the whole application, develop an additional workflow to the existing application with the microservices architecture. That will prepare the organizational culture and mindset for the change while also allowing you to identify hidden bottlenecks in going forward. So, it is important to establish clear, measurable goals and milestones starting from your first project.

2. Separate databases per micro-service

Consider how you segregate the data storage to each constituting microservice. This is a step that you should follow at the planning stage of migrating to microservices. You can make use of architectural patterns such as Command and Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) to deconstruct the primary database as per tasks carried by each micro-service.

If you fail to design a private database for each microservice, you will also fail in achieving loosely coupled architecture that induces scalability, maintainability, and sustainability to the application. However, this does not mean there should be no data transfers between microservices, only that such communications should take place via APIs.

3. Pair automation with micro-services

A single microservices application may contain hundreds or even more unit services that comprise the application. Therefore, building, testing, deploying, and maintaining hundreds of microservices manually, means a further push back from the monolithic model. Therefore, make sure you introduce a ‘build and ship’ automation mechanism such as a stack of CI/CD pipeline tools to experience the full benefits of microservices architecture.

Also, since the micro-services paradigm is essentially a cloud-native approach, we advocate using container technology to build and deploy applications easily and with a minimum time to market into the cloud.

4. Monitor, monitor, and monitor

Over many revolutionary benefits of the microservices architecture, one key drawback is the hardship to monitor applications. As the architecture grows in complexity and dynamicity with multiplied microservices, the observability of the application becomes crucial but complicated.

There are open source monitoring software such as Prometheus, Grafana, Influxdb as well as many other enterprise-level proprietary monitoring tools you can choose from. However, it is best to evaluate an open-source monitoring tool during your first few microservices projects to understand the logging and monitoring capabilities that better suit your agile software application ecosystem.

5. Manage dedicated infrastructure for hosting micro-services

Most of the time many newbies to the microservices domain pay only extreme attention to the logical design of the microservices architecture. But, remember a poorly designed hosting platform cannot complement a finely designed logical architecture to produce the intended outcome. Therefore, fault isolation is a key concept that you should follow when migrating to microservices.
On the same note, language-specific libraries are never a wise choice of supplementary infrastructure to develop microservices. We always encourage users to use frameworks such as Service Meshes and API gateways when developing microservices applications. The best example to prove the fact is the Java-based Netflix OSS Stack that halted in the middle of its development when Netflix finally realized Java is not the de facto language for microservices. So, many companies who followed the Netflix OSS got lost on their way in the journey of transitioning to microservices.

However, given above are only a few major go-to pro tips to kick start the process of migration to microservices. If you’d like to find out more in-depth information about how to design, implement, and manage micro-services for business value or if you’d just like to consult an expert about your own needs in a bit more detail, please don’t delay – contact Cloud Computing Technologies today.

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