Author: Abhinav Dubey, Devtron Labs (Platinum sponsor, KCD Chennai 2022)

Microservice is an architectural style that structures an application as a collection of nearly independent, loosely coupled components that are developed and deployed independently unlike monolith architecture. When a software is designed, architects check for several different architectural styles suitable for their application that need to be followed by developers, while building the application. For a long time, monolithic architectures were used, where the applications were designed, developed, and deployed as a single unit. Even today, many of the enterprises use monolithic architecture.

With the continuous evolution of technology, the need to serve data on different platforms like, mobile phones, tablets, smartwatches, etc has arisen and it becomes difficult to manage the source code by adding more and more lines of programming into the same code base, to cater to the different types of clients. There are several constraints with monolithic architecture some of which are,

1. Serving the application on different gadgets at runtime with the same build
2. Scaling the application
3. Continuous testing of the application
4. Deployment issues - as all components are to be deployed as a single unit
5. Delay in delivery

To address all these and many more challenges, micro-services came into the picture. It breaks down the complete application into smaller parts making it easier to develop and release applications.

Top 7 reasons to adopt microservices

1. Easy Development: Since microservices are smaller units, they provide ease of development for technical teams. There’s no need to assign large teams to work on a single project, risking delays and errors.

2. Scalability: Smaller components are always easier to scale instead of one single monolith. Microservices enable organizations to scale up their applications at a far lower cost, with easy integration with third-party services.

3. Infrastructure: Microservices are Cloud-based and thus provide agility for any organization that adopts them. Components and Services can be spread across many servers and data centers, offering innovation at a lower cost.

4. Continuity: Software can be broken down into component services and each of these services can be deployed without compromising application probity.

5. Decentralized Data: In microservices, all the components have their own data stores which help to maintain the agility of applications with minimal to zero impact on new releases.

6. Technological Flexibility: Adopting microservices enables the organizations to cope up with technological changes, making them independent to choose any tech stack for an individual service.

7. Containerization: Containerization is one of the most efficient ways of scaling applications. Containers provide a runtime environment for applications from development to testing and finally, deploying the microservices wrapped under it. Furthermore, for orchestrating containers in production, Kubernetes is one of the best and most adopted tools in the market.

Organizations like Netflix, Microsoft, Google, Uber, Amazon, PayPal, Twitter, Delhivery, Bharatpe, etc have adopted the microservice architecture and witnessed great results. Netflix has been able to service 93.8 million users globally and stream more than 10 billion hours of movies and shows. Amazon has transitioned to continuous deployment and its engineers have been able to deploy code every 11.7 sec.

Now that you know the benefits of the microservices architecture, why don’t you get started and deploy your applications on Kubernetes in the easiest possible way? Devtron on its first open-source anniversary, has announced to help the first 100 organizations to accelerate 🚀 their journey of adopting Kubernetes FREE OF COST. Check out this Open Source project and do sign-up on #AdoptK8sWithDevtron.