Ottobre 25, 2016 - Commenti disabilitati su Reasons to adopt a microservices architecture
by Paolo D'incau
Microservices based architecture is a trending topic in these days: more and more companies try to take a big step and shape their software and internal organisation following the examples of well-established realities such as Spotify, Netflix and Zalando. Even though it's always positive to keep an eye on new technologies, languages and frameworks available in the market, it wouldn't be wise to blindly embrace them. In this article we will discuss with concrete examples three different reasons that should trigger your interest in knowing more about microservices.
1) Faster Deployment
One of the things that I have noticed in the past years of work on monolithic architectures is that most of the times the process of deploying working features in productions becomes difficult and time consuming. Let me try to expand this point and explain why I believe that a microservices approach can ease these kinds of organizational issues.
When the products you are working on becomes somehow stable and is actively used by customers, the daily work of your team splits in three different activities, that are:
- new features implementation
- bug fixing
- changes of the existing features (small ones, most of the time)
If your code is organized in a monolithic structure chances are very high that your Continuous Integration/Delivery/Deployment pipeline will reflect the same structure which means that it has a unique flow and therefore each and every change to the codebase will need to pass through tests or build steps that are totally unrelated to the change itself; this obviously means that you need more time to deploy your new code in production with all the costs that this implies.
When you need to push to production an urgent fix, but your continuous delivery pipeline remains blocked by non related broken user acceptance tests for hours (they can even be tests on features that are seldom used) your team can undergo frustration and and irritability. I have noticed the same frustation to arise when someone (probably the PO) asks to deploy a given feature to production without deploying other features that are still not ready and the team just can't satisfy the request because the deploy follows the motto "get everything or nothing".
Microservices obviously can help in tackling these kind of issues. If you separate your big project in smaller services built around features you can obviously decouple the related code, with the great benefit that your deployment strategy will follow. This means that you can decide to create a different pipeline for each microservice and therefore you will be able to deploy each component indipendently decreasing drastically the time your bug/feature/change takes to be released and used in production.
2) Easier onboarding
So you develop and improve your software for quite a lot of time (can be years), but things change and some of your developers (I hope not all of them) decide to leave and seek their fortune away from your company. Your product is widely used in production and obviously it needs support and new features, so you decide to hire new developers.
For newcomers it can be really difficult to approach a monolithic codebase and to become productive in a few weeks. It is very reasonable if you reflect on it: your new developers have to understand not only the new business features that need to be added, but also the overall business domain and the way it was coded down by other people who left the project! A monolithic architecture is the main reason that made me hear during the last years things like: "To be productive on this codebase you need N months" or "A couple of years ago we decided that...", I bet you heard something like this during your career too!
If you hired new developers and you want them to be productive as soon as possible, you may consider switching to a microservices architecture. I strongly believe that with such approach new team members can develop all the new features you need in a faster way without the burden of a limited knowledge of what lies in the monolith. Also, I recommend that newcomers should practice work on these new features while pair programming with somebody with more experience on the project so that they can be thought about the business domain, monolith architecture and, why not, team/project history.
3) Smarter scaling
Scalability seems to be a big concern nowadays and it's very common to hear business people ask the dev team whether the system under development "will scale". With the advent of cloud and virtualization everything seems very easy: you just need to deploy your application to several machines and put some sort of load balancer in front of them (e.g. country based) and voilà: you get the scalability you desired almost for free.
While it's pretty obvious that today we have a lot of platforms and tool that comes to our help, it is worth to remember that the way we design and organize our architecture still plays a big role.
Suppose your application just became mainstream and day by day is used by more users: with a monolith, if you want to scale, you are forced to deploy everything to several "replica machines", without taking into consideration whether you need to scale all the features the application provides or just a small subset of them. This kind of approach introduces different business related issues in your organisation, not only technical ones: for example you will have to use several new machines that must provide the computational power needed by the entire application and obviously this will cost you more.
When talking about scalability, microservices seems to outperform many other architectural choices out there. Whenever you feel the urge to scale some part of the system (and I hope you are forced by real metrics and not by your gut) you can decide to spin new small machines that will host only the service that provides the needed feature and nothing more; so if you are running an online shop you will be able to scale only the part connected to searches, while keeping the parts that implement shipment tracking or products recommendation as they are.
With a microservices approach you will get another great benefit: you will be able to kill some of the instances with no mercy because you are confident that just by stopping one or more microservices you are not shutting down the entire system but only a part of it.
Conclusions
In this article we have looked at three good reasons that should address you towards a microservices based architecture when redesigning your legacy monolithic application or starting it from scratch. With microservices you can boost your team productivity, reduce your time to market and scale those parts of the systems that really need it.
It is worth noting that microservices are not the only way to achieve those results, so before embracing them you should evaluate different solutions and also consider the issues that this kind of architecture can bring into your organisation. Finally you should alway keep these words by Sam Newman in mind:
About me
I have a double identity: I code OOP by day and spread FP by night (and during the weekends). I love talking about Erlang, Continuous Delivery, refactoring and microservices. I fight for to the coding “made in Italy".
I've started collecting useful resources about microservices here.
