Building for Success
Microservices Essentials for Executives: The Key to High Velocity Software Development
Source:
Richard Li
forENTREPRENEURS
“Software is eating the world” – Marc Andreesen
Companies thriving in the new world order have technology as a core competency. They build complex cloud applications. They constantly bring new capabilities and features to the market. And despite the constant iteration and updates to their cloud application, their software is rock-solid reliable. How do they achieve such agility and reliability?
Over the past few years, Amazon, Uber, Airbnb, Netflix, Yelp, and many other industry disruptors adopted a new paradigm for developing cloud applications – microservices. The velocity that microservices is giving these disrupters is even raising software architecture to board agendas.
Whether the term microservices is vaguely familiar or something you haven’t encountered yet, this article will cover what it is, why it matters, and what will change in your company when you adopt it.
What are microservices?
Traditionally, cloud applications were built as a single large application (popularly known as the monolith). Some describe microservices as a splintering of monolithic software applications into smaller pieces. That is a true but incomplete explanation that misses the essential benefit of microservices – each of your development teams can work on an independently shippable unit of code, called a microservice. It is better to describe microservices as ‘an architecture for the distributed development of cloud applications.’
For example, the original Amazon.com was a monolithic application, consisting of millions of lines of C++. Over time, Amazon has split the functionality of that single application into smaller services, so there is a separate service for recommendations, for payment, for search, and so forth. In turn, each of these separate services may consist of dozens of smaller microservices.
In the original Amazon architecture, a bug fix to the recommendation service would require changing some C++ in the monolithic application, waiting for other groups to complete their respective changes to the monolithic application, and testing the entire application for release. In the microservices architecture, the recommendation development team can make changes to their microservice – and release it without waiting to coordinate with the other feature teams.
Yelp has also adopted a microservices architecture, consisting of hundreds of services. Just loading the Yelp homepage invokes dozens of microservices, as shown in the example below.
You can read the rest of this excellent article in the below link:
Comments