What are Microservices? The Pros and Cons

Microservice Architecture or Microservices are increasingly being used in the software industry to create large and complex applications. It is an approach where a single application comprises several loosely coupled and independently deployable services. The trend of using microservices has grown over the years as organizations want to become agile while moving towards continuous testing and DevOps.

Let’s understand the concept of microservices in detail.

Monolithic and Microservices Architecture

To understand what microservices are and what they are offering, it is important to acknowledge its predecessor monolithic architecture.

Traditionally, software developers used to create a large application using monolithic architecture. Monolithic refers to composing the entire software application having different components into a single program. It can be said that monolithic architecture is like a huge container that concludes all the components of the software into a single package. And as the size of the application increases so does the complexity of the architecture. This makes the changes in the application slow as it affects the entire application. Simply put, even a small modification in the code might require building and deploying an entirely new version of the application and scaling a part of the application means scaling the entire application.

To solve this problem microservices have come into view. The core objective of a microservice architecture is to make the application design, development and maintenance simpler by breaking them into smaller pieces where each module supports a certain goal and use a well-defined interface to communicate with other services.

Read: Why Microservices Architecture?

Unlike monolithic architecture, each service in the microservice architecture has its own database, programming language, frameworks, containers, and so on which makes the development process easier and more efficient. They are highly maintainable, testable, independently deployable, organized around business capabilities and each related service is owned by a small, separate team.

How Microservices Work?