By IT Brew Staff
less than 3 min read
Definition:
Microservices architecture brings together small, autonomous services onto a network, with each service carrying out a limited function. Those services can be built and iterated separately from one another (called modularity), giving a sysadmin or other IT professional granular control over their architecture.
Very demure, very small
Thanks to its modularity and flexibility, microservices architecture has become very popular among many IT professionals. For example, sysadmins or software developers can quickly spin up containers to test out small applications without impacting their broader IT infrastructure.
Microservices can be of benefit to an IT team that really wants to focus on agility, since microservices are deployed independently. Professionals may find it’s easier to update a service when you don’t have to redeploy an entire application or squish a bottleneck bug before you can proceed.
Experts at Microsoft found that microservices architecture gives IT pros additional advantages in observability, such as real-time monitoring, along with the ability to identify performance slowdowns and other issues before they impact an entire system. Microservices architecture also allows companies to engage in best practices around scalability, efficient code, and data isolation.
Some trade-offs to using this type of architecture model include network congestion and latency. More granular services could mean more interservice communications, which would require “chatty” APIs. IT pros interested in microservices architecture should focus on designing and deploying APIs carefully to avoid an excessively long chain of service dependencies. Data integrity, versioning, and complexity pose additional challenges.
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