Cloud-native applications have been providing organizations with data-driven responses to their queries concerning business operations. Let alone consistency and superior functionality, cloud-native applications allow focusing on various ways to enhance customer experience. There is little doubt that as cloud-native applications continuously evolve, organizations would see to leverage them more for gaining a competitive edge. Microservices, over recent years, have been the preferred architecture for cloud-native applications. It is very important that organizations understand how microservices work for learning about new paradigms and utilizing them for building their cloud-native applications. They can also be added to existing applications to evolve them into cloud-native ones. However, it will be an overstatement to say that microservices are the only best way for creating cloud-native applications. The very next question that arises here is, when to use microservices?
When to Use Microservices for Cloud-Native Applications?
For complex or distributed applications critical for organizations, microservices have proved to be a boon. They are making it easier to build applications as a stack of services capable of being independently developed, scaled, and tested. Even so, there are some considerations that organizations need to be aware of.
- Organizations must look to implement microservices for building cloud-native applications based on their requirement. Using them for all of their applications or none of their applications won’t be a good strategy at all. By evolving and extending their monolithic applications and adding use cases of microservices will enable them not to kickstart from scratch for working with the approach of microservices architecture.
- In use cases where microservices deliver robust outcomes, such as diverse technology leverage, resilient boundaries for subsystems, and independent deployment, new bottlenecks may come to the fore. Some of them may be associated with a distributed deployment of applications, including independent or fragmented models of data. These may also be associated with gaining strong communication between the microservices or achieving consistency. All in all, microservices tend to introduce greater complexity vis-à-vis traditional monolithic applications.
- The complex nature of the microservices architecture makes it suitable for only applications that are compatible to them. Such applications involve the more complex or large ones having multiple subsystems. Therefore, it makes more sense to invest in architectures with greater complexity, if organizations are looking for efficient maintenance and long-term agility for their applications on the cloud.
- For use cases with low complexity, it is commendable that organizations continue operating with monolithic applications or even simpler approaches. For evolving from monolithic, organizations can commence by breaking down their applications and going toward microservices carefully by following best practices.
Benefits and Challenges of Using Microservices for Cloud-Native Applications
It is self-implied while using any technology their benefits tag along with new challenges and microservices are not so different. Get a quick look at the benefits and challenges of using microservices for cloud-native applications.
| Benefits | Challenges |
| Security is enhanced, as all services are more independent components, which makes the surface for attacks extremely smaller. | Not meant for legacy applications because re-architecting the codebases leads to high cost and complexity. |
| Simpler to understand all about every independent component and the way they work in tandem. | Deploying distributed systems of service clusters is tedious and complicated. |
| High scalability due to services segregation. | Time-intensive testing processes, unlike monolithic applications. |
| Improved testing, which can be attributed to smaller services. | Most developer tools lack the capability for supporting distributed deployment. |
| Promotes CI/CD, enabling complex application releases faster. | Extra code must be built for communication effectiveness between modules. |
However, it is no wonder that the benefits of microservices outweigh their challenges and that solutions such as cloud-native APIs have emerged to mitigate the said complexities. Adoption of microservices is therefore increasing among small as well as large organizations. A social media analytics study by Gartner shows that microservices architecture mentions increased tremendously, over 40%, between 2019 and 2020.For example, a leading Brussels-based agency, hub.brussels aimed to build a robust analytics tool to promote a next-generation shopping sector in the region. Blazeclan helped the agency by creating a state-of-the-art platform by using microservices and DevSecOps tools for making it highly resilient and scalable. This not only helped hub.brussels optimize their overall costs by 55% but also improve performance by a staggering 450%.
End of the Line
The microservices architecture is a tough row to hoe. They compel organizations to build capabilities for managing their development cycle with greater complexity. While technology endpoints increase unabated the need to adjust security processes becomes essential. However, enabling microservices architecture empowers organizations to gain a competitive edge through cloud-native applications. Cloud-native APIs are the solution for mitigating complexities related to microservices, facilitating the simplification and remediation of the digital ecosystem.