Microservices


It is a growing belief that Microservices will take over where SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) leaves off, and there are a number of reasons to consider using Microservices to build enterprise applications. 

What are microservices? Essentially they are simple, single-purpose applications that work together to form large applications. They are relatively easy to build and maintain, thus promoting rapid application development. There has been a strong movement recently toward a more agile style of building large systems. Using microservices, businesses can adapt quickly to new requirements with software components to avoid the extensive recoding and retesting required for complex, monolithic applications. It’s estimated that by 2020, 30 percent of total global IT spending will be on next-gen technology and 90 percent of the world’s data will be processed using this new technology, so microservices will be essential as enterprises modernise their application portfolios.

We’ve identified the following 10 reasons to use microservices to build enterprise applications:

  1. They promote big data best practices. Microservices naturally fit within a data pipeline-oriented architecture, which aligns with the way big data should be collected, ingested, processed and delivered. Each step in a data pipeline handles one small task in the form of a microservice.
  2. They are relatively easy to build and maintain. Their single-purpose design means they can be built and maintained by smaller teams. Each team can be cross-functional while also specialise in a subset of the microservices in a solution.
  3. They enable higher-quality code. Modularising an overall solution into discrete components helps application development teams focus on one small part at a time. This simplifies the overall coding and testing process.
  4. They simplify cross-team co-ordination. Unlike traditional service-oriented architectures (SOAs), which typically involve heavyweight inter-process communications protocols, microservices use event-streaming technologies to enable easier integration.
  5. They enable real-time processing. At the core of a microservices architecture is a publish-subscribe framework, enabling data processing in real time to deliver immediate output and insights.
  6. They facilitate rapid growth. Microservices enable code and data reuse the modular architecture, making it easier to deploy more data-driven use cases and solutions for added business value.
  7. They enable more outputs. Data sets often are presented in different ways to different audiences; microservices simplify the way data can be extracted for various end users.
  8. Easier to assess updates in the application life cycle. Advanced analytics environments, including those for machine learning, need ways to assess existing computational models against newly created models. A-B and multivariate testing in a microservices architecture enable users to validate their updated models.
  9. They enable scale. Scalability is about more than the ability to handle more volume. It’s also about the effort involved. Microservices make it easier to identify scaling bottlenecks and then resolve those bottlenecks at a per-microservice level.
  10. Many popular tools are available. A variety of technologies in the big data world, including the open-source community, work well in a microservices architecture. Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, NoSQL databases and many streaming analytics tools can be used for microservices. We are also proud to partner with Pivotal in this area.

Why Integrella?

Integrella specialises in delivering application integration for enterprise and cloud applications. Working at the fulcrum of data interchange within the enterprise means that we review and cater for all changes in the source and target data models and processes. We develop microservices to handle these changes using DevOps frameworks to ensure that these changes are developed, tested and delivered as quickly and as seamlessly as possible into our solutions. Working in this way, we believe that our expertise, approach and solutions are of significant benefit to the wider enterprise architecture.

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