5 Benefits of Building Applications Using Microservices Architecture

Competing in challenging markets often requires businesses to stay nimble and agile in their customer experience delivery – be it for products or services. With the digital economy growing at an accelerated pace, it is natural for technology platforms to be the core of your business, on the consumer side as well as on the operations front.

Nearly 95% of all new digital workloads are expected to be deployed on the cloud by 2025, according to Gartner. So, when deciding on a technology architecture for powering mission-critical technology, CIOs must ensure that it is built for the cloud.

When it comes to a cloud-friendly architecture, microservices are by far the best option for enterprises to build their digital services. Studies show that nearly 74% of businesses are leveraging microservices to build their core applications or platforms on the cloud. The remaining are mostly in the planning stage for now but will eventually transition away from the traditional monolithic application development model and embrace the modular structure of microservices architecture.

The Key Benefits of Building Applications Using Microservices Architecture

Despite the popularity, there are still enterprises that hesitate to move from their traditional monolithic approach to application development. This is primarily due to the lack of awareness about the core benefits of microservices.

Let us explore the key benefits that applications built with microservices can experience when compared to monolithic applications:

• Cloud-friendly

Microservices is by far the most optimal technology architecture for building cloud-first digital platforms or applications. Popular cloud infrastructure vendors like AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, etc. have inherent deployment, management, and orchestration features that help in managing individual services deployed as microservices. This allows administrators to achieve operational flexibility for specific services and not the whole application. Such flexibility offers better server resource management and lower costs with minimal effort.

• Targeted Scalability

As consumer demands vary dynamically in challenging markets, the use of microservice architecture brings a huge advantage for enterprises with their applications. They can scale individual services within an application on demand without necessarily altering the entire application. This provides a massive advantage in terms of saving resources and costs. For small and medium businesses, such a tailored scaling of services provides a major relief from capital expenditure while helping them stay competitive in demanding situations. Upgrades in configuration, computational resource allocation, storage ecosystem, etc. can all be made to just a specific service or set of services rather than the application as a whole.

• Better Fault Tolerance

From a development perspective, microservices help application developers to gain better control over digital services. They have more focused visibility into the faulty services that cause issues and can isolate them quickly for rectification. There will be minimal or zero disruption to the business services as microservices allow for modular audits and remedial measures. Such capabilities offer a major relief in lowering the risk of failure for mission-critical digital services. DevOps teams can coordinate and isolate risky components on the back end while for end-users, ensuring business as usual on the experience side.

• Flexible Development

With microservices, it becomes easier to assign smaller teams to handle the requirements of specific digital services. The smaller development scope is easier to understand, and the expansion of teams will be easier since they have fewer overheads to manage. Developers can also resort to using different tools according to the tasks they encounter rather than having to be constrained by blanket enforcement of tools and approaches for the entire application. Each module can be built with a programming language or framework as found fit for its maximum relevancy. Additionally, the codebase for each module works independently and can be modified without the need for changing others. Individual modules can be tested and deployed separately.

• Operational Speed

Thanks to the modular architecture, enterprise applications built using microservices can exhibit far higher levels of operational speed than traditional monolithic applications—the reason being the isolated execution of modules needed for specific service delivery. Only the constituent module of a specific service needs to be running and not the entire application suite. For example, during the login stage of an application, only the microservices handling credential management and validation need to be executed for a user rather than the entire end-to-end application.

Microservice Architecture is Here to Stay

With most organizations pivoting their digital landscape into the cloud, the adoption of microservices will see major progress in the coming years. The tremendous scale of flexibility it offers is unparalleled for any other approach and is extremely helpful in supporting the cloud aspirations of business leaders.

However, the journey into seamless performance and sustainable growth with microservices depends on how well your business can understand and leverage the full potential of the architecture. Only an experienced technology partner like Verinite can help build the right strategic roadmap for your microservice adoption journey. Get in touch with us to know more.