Microservices – Why does it matter for continuous delivery

Software delivery organizations across the globe has adopted continuous delivery as a central practice to build high quality software faster, with less stress and effort. One of the goals of continuous delivery is to make deployments as boring as possible. To assure that we need to deploy often and find errors as soon as possible before delivering the software to end user, continuous delivery promotes certain architectural approaches of a platform. Releasing often, with small changes, is extremely difficult task to perform for a complex application with a huge monolithic architecture. The idea of rearranging the software architecture into smaller, focused, domain-specific applications composed of microservices has gained a lot of popularity in the last 2-3 years.

Microservices are a new software development pattern emerging from recent trends in technology and practice. A microservice is an independent, self-contained process that provides a single business capability. Different Microservices act in concert as one larger system by communicating to each other using a language agnostic API. In microservice architecture each service is highly decoupled from each other and are created in mind to focus on one problem domain.

Monolithic and the problem for continuous delivery

Traditional monolithic applications are built as a single unit, where all the functionality is pulled into a single process and is replicated across multiple servers. The single application is responsible for all functionality including handling requests, authentication, executing business/ domain logic, persistence, logging, exception handling etc. Due to this behavior its makes it hard to add a small change in the system that involves building, testing and deploying the entire application. Scalability and availability involves running multiple instances of this application behind a load balancer on multiple servers even though the bottleneck lays in a single component in the application. As a result, updating monolithic applications become time-consuming activity that needs to have a lot of coordination between people involved in multiple functions and departments.

Apart from the issues related to deployment and scalability, there are some other challenges that this kind of architecture brings when the application grows in size.

A large code base makes it hard for all the developers to understand and modify the application. This makes the code base harder to manage and difficult to add new features which also results in bad quality creeping in as time progress. The team is forced to stick on the technology stack which was chosen at the time of starting the development and commit to the stack for a long-term. This also introduces dividing engineering teams at an organization level to focus on specific functional areas, like UI team , database teams etc. The coordination, development and deployment processes becomes harder with this structure which takes the teams a step backward in their journey towards practices like DevOps, continuous delivery etc.

How microservices helps?

In contrast to Monolithic applications, microservices makes independent management of business functionality by separating the functionality into smaller services that can be independently deployed, tested and scaled. With microservices scaling and deploying each service can be done independently without affecting the other parts of the system, by creating instances of these services across containers or virtual machines. In short a Microservice can be summarized as

“Applications composed of small, independently versioned, and scalable customer-focused services that provides a unique business capability and communicate with each other over standard protocols with well-defined interfaces.”

In the microservice approach the application is divided into smaller parts that communicate with each other with lightweight mechanisms like REST, message brokers etc.

Due to the highly evolving business needs, software applications needs to be build considering high scalability and availability to respond to the needs of customers in an agile way. This is only possible if, making change to a service is less expensive and risky. Microservices make this possible due to the fact that each service is operationally encapsulated by other services and are independently deployable without affecting the other services in the infrastructure. This makes easier for development teams to apply the changes and test them independently faster than ever.

Free white paper

The white paper addresses the common characteristics and challenges with solutions to your journey towards refactoring a monolithic to a microservice. You can download the complete article from this link.