When competition increases, the time-to-market parameter comes to the fore. It refers to the speed at which any improvements to customer services and products are released to the market.

 

This may include a feature that speeds up the speed of loading content, improves the usability of the site and application, and promotes cross-selling.

 

A vivid example is super apps in banks, where integrated voice assistants, chats with other users, and the ability not only to pay bills from the application but also order goods and services from related services in it can be considered additional functionality.

 

Due to digitalization and the pandemic that has pushed many companies online, the time-to-market of new customer functionality has become one of the business performance metrics. It is believed that a low TTM parameter reduces the viability of a product by 20% (data from Gartner).

 

In pursuit of speed, companies are beginning to reconsider approaches to building and developing the IT architecture that underlies services. The understanding came that the classical infrastructure (it is also called monolithic) does not cope well with actual challenges. Instead, they are increasingly turning to microservices development – a special approach that allows you to accelerate IT development and the release of final products to the market.

 

According to Allied Market Research analysts, the microservices market will exceed $8 billion by 2026, demonstrating an annual increase of 18%. This is one of the growth points of the global IT market.

What are the benefits of microservices?

Consider the example of two types of architecture.

Monolithic architectures

They are characterized by a rigid hierarchy and coherence. Everything in them is subject to business logic. If we are talking about an online store, at the business level there is a payment service, a shopping cart, a personal account, and other functional blocks for customers.

Changing one of the components affects the rest, correcting the business logic. At the same time, all services access a single database – the main repository for the range of goods, prices, discounts, and so on.

Minuses:

  • Difficulty making changes. To change something, albeit minor, in the structure of, for example, an e-commerce platform (let’s say the module code responsible for the product catalogue), you need to manually track and correct a large number of other dependencies. This not only increases the time it takes to finalize an online resource but also requires the involvement of a large number of engineers.

 

  • Scaling difficulties. In monolithic architectures, it is not always possible to increase computing power for one of the services, for example, only the main showcase of goods or the module responsible for payment. It is possible to increase resource consumption for the entire site, and this is often redundant.

 

  • Failure risks. Due to the connectivity of the components, a failure at the software level of one of the services is very likely to negatively affect the entire platform.

 

  • Difficulty in introducing new technologies. If the platform was written, let’s say, in Python, switching to something else is virtually unrealistic. In the IT industry, this is also called legacy – a legacy infrastructure that can function for years in a static form.

 

  • Large support costs. When there are a lot of services, you need a super-skilled specialist who can see the top-level picture. Most likely, you will not be able to find this on the market, or it will cost too much for the company. The only way is to grow it from within.

Microservices

It does not affect the user interface in any way, but inside it is built according to fundamentally different rules. Each service is an isolated entity that has its own storage and a complete set of files, libraries, etc. to create an application. Each service, as most often happens, is developed by the same separate team of a product manager, a DevOps specialist, an architect, and an engineer.

Pluses:

  • Ease and speed of deployment. By not relying on other services, changes can be made much faster—weeks instead of months in a monolithic architecture.

 

  • Optimal scaling. Performance improvements apply only to those services that really need them. This results in savings on infrastructure.

 

  • Large selection of technology stack. The programming language can be changed depending on the preferences of the IT developer or relevance to a specific business task. This is important because it allows you to attract specialists from the market who do not want to limit themselves to one technology or another.

 

  • Multiple uses. Once a microservice is written, it can be reused many times in similar tasks. This reduces labour costs and the number of routine operations performed by an IT specialist.

However, do not think that microservices are a panacea. Many companies are in no hurry to move to them, as they are afraid of losing their investments in infrastructure. In addition, objectively, not for every application and type of business, the transition to microservices will provide tangible value.

 

In addition, “cutting the monolith” itself does not seem such an easy task. An additional barrier is the same high costs of infrastructure maintenance. If the number of services in the infrastructure exceeds a hundred, the help of additional architects and DevOps specialists is needed to develop APIs for application consistency.

 

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