Microservices changing Enterprise Application Architectures
In this current dynamic and fast paced digital era, we often see that incumbent vendors are disrupted by bold new market entrants who offer innovative solutions and new business models. These new vendors leverage modern computing principles and cloud native application architectures, allowing them to roll out new and diverse services at much faster rate in a much more scalable and efficient way that incumbent vendors feel challenged to match with thier existing traditional or core legacy applications. So, what exactly is the challenge with traditional apps and what is the magic in these new architectures?
Traditional enterprise applications were designed as monolithic applications and typically deployed on-prem and they consume lot of resources and personnel to deploy, manage and operate the applications. Application maintenance is a big challenge. Customers had to bring down or upgrade the entire application even though bugs or defects were localized to a certain module of the application. Software updates and patch updtaes had to go through change control process and tedious backup/restore procedures that often result in nightmares. Customers had to wait for 12 to 18 months to get major release updates. Scaling of application was even more challenging, and had to be done in entirety even if the real need was to scale certain components like web front end, event processing, database, or notifications etc. Overall, traditional monolithic apps posed real challenge for enterprises to be agile and innovate and deliver faster to meet growing business demands.
With the new Microservices paradigm, applications are broken down into collection of right-sized services called as microservices, which are independent of other microservices within the application. Microservices provide significant benefits when compared to traditional architectures. To begin with, microservices are built ground up with an API approach, and can be independently developed and deployed,allowing software vendors to bring updates, bug fixes and new releases at a much faster pace. This also allows to broaden the scope of innovation and as ecosystem partners can implement part of the application as microservices and extend app functionality in ways that was not possible with monolothic applications. From a runtime standpoint, microservices can also scale independently of other microservices, allowing customers to identify and put more resources where the real need is. Scaling of microservices based apps can span across environments and clouds, allowing customers to realize true hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud strategy. Newer implementations are going even further to distribute microservices on to multiple servers to provide scaling and isolation leveraging technologies like messaging, load-balancing and routing over secure channel to achieve a true distributed and multi-cloud architectures.
It is clear that microservices are changing enterprise application architectures as we witness that most SaaS vendors and large scale web 2.0 companies like Amazon, NetFlix, eBay, Google, Microsoft etc. are arleady using microservices in thier production services. And as a result, we all are enjoying thier uninterrupted, fast and effective services on a day-to-day basis. .
We will explore answers to the following key questions in our subsequent blogs – Why this architecture hasn’t reached to a typical enterprise yet? And what needs to happen to accelarate enterprise Microservices adoption?
