Benefits of Microservices Architecture

04/11/2024 9 minutes to read

Alex Bolshakova

Why are microservices taking the business world by storm? By early 2021, a striking 85% of companies with over 2,000 employees had embraced them, according to Statista. In short, because microservices offer capabilities and advantages that a traditional monolithic architecture simply can’t match.

At Expert Soft, we’ve seen firsthand the impact of microservices across client projects, and we know that simply listing benefits isn’t enough. Drawing from our experience, we’ve gathered practical tips to help you not only understand the benefits of microservices but also learn how to unleash their full potential.

Quick Tips for Busy People

Here’s a quick overview of the key microservices features and advantages for those on the go.

Scalability: Microservices allow you to scale some services independently to achieve maximum efficiency with minimum costs.
Flexibility: Each microservice may be updated, deployed, and managed independently, offering unparalleled flexibility for rapid iteration.
Resilience: When one service fails, the rest of the system stays up, reducing downtime.
Security: When exposed due to a breach, isolated microservices have better data security.
Technology freedom: Instead of getting locked into one particular stack, select the best technology that works for each microservice.
Faster development: While increasing the speed of development cycles, development teams can work on different services at the same time.

Now, let’s elaborate on the features in detail. We’ll remind you what a microservices structure looks like and then move into the benefits of microservices that make them such a potent choice for modern businesses.

Microservices Architecture: Quick Reminder

The microservices architecture is about decomposing the back-end into independent services with each assigned to perform a certain task. Microservices communicate via APIs (REST or gRPC) with each other, allowing them to interact together as a system, but operate independently.

In these specifics lies the key capabilities and benefits of microservices, such as independent development and deployment of each service. Often, each of the services has its own data space and can be built using different technologies, which makes them more adaptable and resilient to changes.

Because of its advantages, this architecture is particularly appropriate for big, complicated applications that need high scalability, fault isolation, and continuous delivery.
Before we dive into the capabilities of microservices deeper, let’s get inspired by looking at a real-world example that showcases the true business value of microservices: Amazon.

A quick case study

Through the early 2000s, the Amazon retail platform was one large monolithic application that did not scale or upgrade easily. This caused rapid growth in the delays in development, inefficient coding, and service interdependencies that discouraged Amazon from being able to meet customer demand.

By 2001, Amazon realized its monolith stood in the way of scaling. What was the solution? An overall move to microservices. Amazon took all of that complicated code and chunked it down into smaller services independent of each other.

This move smoothed not only the development cycle but also allowed for quicker and more efficient updates and scalability. The shift laid the bedrock for Amazon’s cloud service offerings like AWS and brought benefits that helped Amazon grow into the trillion-dollar company it is today.

Now let’s take a closer look at how microservices benefits can level up your business. Here are six key advantages, with some practical tips from our experience, to help you get the most out of your microservices setup.

6 Advantages of Microservices Architecture

Below are vital microservices business benefits, but if poorly implemented, these same advantages can quickly become challenges. That is why you can find some practical tips from Expert Soft’s experience, which will help you avoid common pitfalls and unlock the true benefits of microservices.

1. Advanced scalability

While in the case of monolithic systems, you need to scale the whole application, in microservices, a developer can scale each service independently based on demand. This means that instead of spending resources on a large scope of work, you can dedicate it to just one service needed, saving large amounts of money.
Combining microservices with cloud technologies, the benefits skyrocket. Cloud infrastructure allows businesses to scale individual services in real time, letting them handle workloads efficiently while only paying for the resources they actually use, helping to keep costs down.

Expert Soft's tip

Leverage DevOps practices, such as CI/CD, and tools, e.g. Docker for containerization, to streamline deployments and ensure smooth scaling. To further maximize scalability, employ orchestration tools, e.g. Kubernetes. By dynamically allocating resources and balancing workloads in real-time, orchestration ensures each service scale precisely when and where it’s needed, preventing bottlenecks and optimizing system performance.

2. System flexibility

Since services are loosely coupled and communicate via APIs, updates or bug fixes can be applied to particular components of the system without causing downtime. This isolation of services from one another provides flexibility for quickly rolling out features or patches without disrupting the rest of the application.

Expert Soft's tip

Avoid hard-coding values, for example, service URLs or database addresses, as they tie your code to specific configurations. Every time you want to make a change, like settings or environment-specific variables, you’d have to change the code and redeploy manually, which takes too much time and is error prone. Use configuration files instead to easily manage changes without redeployment, enhancing flexibility and reliability.

3. Increased system resilience

Unlike monolithic systems, microservices implement fail-stop principles: if one service crashes, the rest of the system keeps working, and as a result, the downtime is minimal.

Isolation of failures is a big advantage of microservices and one of the most important features in preventing full system crashes.

Let’s see how Expert Soft puts theory into practice to implement microservices development services for improving system resilience and getting rid of those risks.

Problem
The client is a global credit rating agency. They had to split their existing data access and search portal into two different systems with seamless search across them. Their original system suffered from data loss and lack of automatic recovery upon synchronization failures, thus affecting the resilience of the system.

Solution
Expert Software made key improvements to the customer platform’s existing microservices architecture, developing a more resilient system. We introduced asynchronous communication between the services using Kafka message brokers, making sure that messages that fail are queued and reprocessed without data loss. Hence, the customer now can maintain data consistent between MongoDB and Solr, ensuring system stability.

For more information, explore the full case here.

4. Improved data security

Because every microservice runs independently, a breach in one service doesn’t affect the other services. In this way, the impact of a security incident is limited, since only the affected service would require attention.

Furthermore, microservices normally implement their own local security controls, like access control and authentication, thereby further reducing the possibility of lateral movement within the system. After all, IBM Market Development and Insights research showed that microservices implementation improved the security of customer data by up to 29%, proving the benefit.

This isolation and enhanced security framework also make it easier for enterprises to meet strict regulatory standards, such as GDPR and HIPAA. By segmenting sensitive data into specific services with dedicated security protocols, companies can better control access and protect personal information.

Expert Soft's tip

Implement a dedicated authentication microservice to boost security in your microservices architecture. By separating this function, you ensure that authentication processes are handled centrally, rather than being scattered across different services. The separate service validates users and issues JWT tokens, which are then used by other microservices, ensuring only authorized access and reducing the risk of unauthorized data exposure.

5. Technology freedom

Microservices enable you to choose the best technology for each job, not coupled to one platform. This advantage gives a lot of freedom that can result in more optimization and innovation.

Expert Soft's tip

Avoid a “technology zoo.” While microservices offer flexibility, using too many technologies can hinder collaboration, make it hard for developers to step into new services, and create costly skill gaps if key team members leave.

6. Accelerated development

Data reveals that companies using microservices achieve a 29% faster time-to-market for new features. This benefit comes from the ability of teams to work simultaneously on separate microservices, reducing dependencies across teams. With each team responsible for a specific set of services, they can operate independently, solve their own challenges, and maintain their own pace without waiting on other teams.

Expert Soft's tip

To fully leverage this microservices business benefit, use microservice templates. Templates provide a consistent setup framework, ensuring every new service meets your standards from the start. This approach saves setup time, minimizes errors, and lets developers focus on innovation rather than recreating foundational elements.

Not so Smooth or Microservices Challenges

While there are many advantages of microservices architecture, it equally has its own share of challenges. A quick view of some of the main hurdles is given below.

Correct system decoupling

Poor decoupling can lead to bottlenecks, where services become overly interdependent. In these cases, every update, scaling action, or troubleshooting effort impacts other parts of the system, increasing error risk and reducing overall efficiency. To avoid these issues, apply the single responsibility principle (SRP): each microservice should handle only one responsibility, creating a more maintainable and scalable system.
Deployment and versioning

Managing several services is a way for deployment chaos. Here, employ CI/CD and automation to avoid versioning conflicts.
Testing complexity

With numerous microservices, it can be difficult to test all scenarios. Implement robust test frameworks to ensure checking both individual and integrated functionality, catching issues early and enhancing overall system reliability.
Data management challenges

Each microservice should have its own data store to avoid conflicts and ensure a clean separation of responsibilities. This is one of the microservices’ best practices that prevents data inconsistencies and simplifies scaling and updates.

As you see, just like any other architecture, microservices come with their own challenges and benefits. And this is true not only for back-end — the front-end can also gain significant advantages from a similar approach, leveraging microfrontends.

Microfrontends: Worth Implementing?

Microfrontends is an architectural approach that extends the principles of microservices to the front-end, enabling different teams to develop and operate different parts of an application independently. This is particularly valuable on large-scale platforms where multiple teams need to move at speed without necessarily affecting other people’s work.

The major benefit of microfrontends is team autonomy, reflected in shorter deployment cycles, fewer bottlenecks, and easier scaling.

Many leading companies from various industries use microfrontends. Here’s a snapshot of key adopters:

IKEA and Zalando: Microfrontends allow them to manage their codebase more easily and deliver features on their retail platforms faster.
American Express and PayPal: The idea of using microfrontends is to increase scalability without losing flexibility on their web applications.
Starbucks: It adopts microfrontends in its online ordering web app, enabling the creation of a better user experience while the codebase scales.

Expert Soft’s tip. Before diving into microfrontends, evaluate if the complexity suits your platform and team structure. For large platforms with many moving parts, microfrontends can enhance efficiency and flexibility. However, for smaller projects, the added complexity may outweigh the benefits, making traditional approaches a better fit.

To Sum Up

With their key benefits, such as flexibility, scalability, and resilience, microservices have proven to be a powerful solution for streamlining large platforms. At Expert Soft, we’ve guided several companies through the migration process and helped them gain maximum advantage from the architecture without getting caught up in pitfalls.

Be it migration or optimization of the present system, our microservices development services will guide you at every step. Feel free to reach out to us and discuss how we can optimize your architecture for better performance.

FAQ

What is the difference between SOA and microservices architecture?

The core difference between SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) and microservices lies in the scope and granularity of the services. Microservices are smaller, more focused, and independently deployable, aligning seamlessly with DevOps practices for continuous integration and deployment. In contrast, SOA services are bigger and more connected. Microservices also offer far greater flexibility in technology choice, deployment, and scaling for modern agile development environments.
What to consider when deciding on a microservices architecture for a project?

When choosing to use microservices architecture, some of the key aspects to consider will include scalability needs, the level of complexity for your application, how the teams are structured, and whether an organization will be able to support the required operational overhead. Second, evaluate your current technology stack, integrations, and their further maintenance, in the long run to make sure that microservices would bring more performance benefits without overcomplicating things.