Why Microservices Are the Smart Choice for Scalable Software

Have you ever witnessed your bespoke software system evolve from a tidy little project into a huge, ugly mess of code? Trust us, you’re not alone. As a business changes and expands, so will its needs. New functionality, additional customers, surprising bugs, shifting requirements, and before you know it, code starts to fight back.

At Rejoicehub LLP, we’ve watched that reality play out a bit too often. That’s why we frequently advise an alternative to custom application development: an architecture of multiple small, loosely connected ‘microservices’. This way, as your business evolves, your application evolves too to stay headed in the right direction.

So let’s talk about what microservices are, and more importantly, why they are the better choice when you want your software to scale.

Quick Summary

Artificial intelligence offers tremendous opportunities. However, responsible use of AI is important to alleviate risks (e.g., privacy violations, unfairness, and lack of transparency) associated with employing artificial intelligence technology. Compliance-ready AI provides an end-to-end solution that ensures secure handling of data, unbiased treatment of individuals, and ongoing oversight and governance of developed AI products.

The RejoiceHub Company builds compliance-ready artificial intelligence solutions for businesses using a human-centric approach (i.e., human-in-the-loop) so that businesses may realize the benefits of employing advanced technologies, while also being able to trust and verify that such technologies have been developed in accordance with established laws and regulations.

What are microservices?

Imagine a conventional application is like a large department store: All departments, from billing to support, to inventory, to the front end, to marketing, are in one massive building. Everything is connected. That’s great if you're small. However, the larger you get, the more crowded, disorganized, and cumbersome the building is.

Instead, visualize a marketplace comprising several independent shops, such as a bookstore, bakery, and clothing store. Each one is independent. Essentially, microservices are similar. There is one “shop” or “service” for each business function, such as logging in, payment processing, inventory, or notifications. Each microservice is independent.

Each service communicates with the others through understandable APIs (like doors connecting shops), but each is self-contained. This allows you to update, scale, or restart one without impacting the others.

Why microservices are often a good fit - especially when it comes to custom software applications

Microservices split applications into small, independent services, making them easier to scale and update. This flexibility is ideal for custom software that needs to evolve quickly.

1. Your software grows smoothly

• A problem may be little noticed unless it becomes serious. If only the “shop” for payments is getting heavy traffic, you might need to scale only this feature instead of swelling up the entire store.
• That’s efficient. You pay for what you need.
• And performance is kept snappy; your users aren’t left waiting for the non-relevant bits to catch up.

2. Faster Delivery & Happier Teams

• One team or even two separate developers may be working on two different services without interfering with each other's activities.
• Want to push an update? Don’t have to redeploy the whole thing. Just the changed bits.
• You're free to pick the correct tool or language for a given task or job, whether it's writing APIs using Node.js, or handling data using Python, and so on.

3. Fewer cascading failures, easier upkeep

• It means that, if for instance, the notifications service is down, the other functionalities of an app, such as payments, product catalog, and login, can still work.
• Codebases are smaller, making them easier to comprehend, debug, or maintain as time passes by.
• An update or refactoring of individual pieces doesn’t require rewriting the whole system

4. Teams that stay nimble

• Microservice architecture promotes the use of small, focused teams with each team as the “owner” of a “mini-app” (microservice).

• This structure creates well-defined areas of responsibility, rapid means of making modifications, and full autonomy for the team members themselves. Therefore, when the business needs change, you do not have to completely re-engineer a monolithic system; you simply modify or redeploy the microservice itself.

How we at Rejoicehub LLP approach microservices (without over-complicating things)

We’ve learned that microservices are powerful but only if you implement them thoughtfully. Here’s how we do it, when we do it:

• Start with business logic, not tech buzzwords

We define the real business requirements of the business (User accounts, payments, analytics) and design solutions based on these requirements. This means that each solution is based on a defined role of the business, thus making sense in a real business environment. On the other hand, we do not oversplit services; in fact, too many small services will most likely create more problems than they will solve.

• Define clear boundaries & communication

Every Service is Built with a Clean API. When creating services, the way in which those services communicate is critical to our success; therefore, we use simple/consistent interfaces, REST/Message/Event, and we plan for Versioning so that future changes will not require users to relearn how to use the services.

• Invest in good automation and observability

Automation is a must! "Good" automation, which is provided through the use of continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), unit testing, integration testing, logging, monitoring, etc., should always be included with Microservices due to their increased flexibility but also increased number of moving parts. All of the above items are your "safety net" when using Microservices, as they give you the ability to track what is happening, when it is happening, and where it is happening. This is not an isolated opinion; many industry practitioners agree that this is essential to your Microservices implementation.

For larger projects, we may also consider items such as an API gateway, load balancer(s), service discovery tool(s), and/or service mesh tools, depending on the complexity and size of your project.

• Be smart about data & consistency

We do not force the use of a single large database; each microservice manages its own data storage (where applicable). This significantly reduces the level of coupling between microservices. For data flowing between microservices, we utilize asynchronous messaging or event-driven architecture whenever applicable. The need for distributed transactions across microservices is rare for us; we prefer an eventual consistency model. An eventual consistency model is generally more maintainable than a distributed transaction model, and provides greater long-term resiliency than a distributed transaction model.

• For legacy, take it slow, don’t rewrite everything at once

When we deal with an older monolithic system, we do not just break it into pieces all at once. Rather than breaking it into pieces all at once, we will break one service out of the system. In this way, we ensure that the business is still operating while preserving the features that it needs, and the risk of breaking the business is minimal while we continue to modernize the software.

Also Read: Build vs Buy: How to Choose the Right AI Platform for Business

There are trade-offs. But we know how to handle them

Microservices aren’t a magic wand. Here are some of the common downsides and how we deal with them:

• Distributed Complexity: We deal with network calls, service discovery, versioning, latency, etc, in each service we utilize. We try and limit the number of services to an amount manageable within our environment and deploy the use of well-known patterns/tools to eliminate any issues with inter-service communication.

• Data & Consistency Headaches: Keeping data synchronized amongst many locations is difficult due to the lack of centralization. Therefore, we establish data ownership early on and rely on event-driven flows for updates across services. We also do everything possible to prevent heavy distributed transactions from occurring.

• DevOps overhead: A lot of the DevOps work is building out the infrastructure (deployment pipelines, logging, monitoring, etc.) that we build for an app before it’s released. In doing so, we provide the long-term sustainability of the app’s infrastructure. Additionally, it is also important to keep the build process as close to the app as possible.

• Testing and debugging complexity: Complexities with testing and debugging that involve bugs that cross service boundaries require the ability to carefully trace the issue between the microservices. Because of this expectation, we have stressed automated testing and logging, and observability from the beginning of the work we do.

In summary, microservices can add complexity to the development process, but when implemented carefully, the overall benefits of microservices almost always outweigh the costs of implementing the complexity.

When microservices are a great fit (and when they’re overkill)

You’ll likely see real benefit from a microservices approach if:

• Your application has high expectations to grow more users and more traffic, as well as new features.

• Your application includes many types of domains, e.g., user management, payment processing, a product catalogue, notification services, and an analytical service.

• Your feature set and the future direction of your business will change based on customer feedback, so you will need to provide a great deal of flexibility, rapid time to market, and ease of maintenance for both creating new features and fixing problems.

• Long-term maintenance and reliability of your application is critical for its long-term success.

• You may have multiple teams developing features that operate independently from each other.

If you're developing a very small, simple app where you won't need this level of complexity, building a simpler, modular monolith may be the best option for you.

Why you might choose Rejoicehub LLP for your next custom software project

Because we don’t believe in applying microservices blindly. We believe in smart decisions.

Here’s what we bring to the table:

• A scalable and efficient architecture: Your business should be able to scale along with the product's growth, rather than forcing it to grow against the current systems.

• Faster delivery and flexibility: Faster, more flexible delivery with smaller chunks, faster iterations, and a smaller chance of failure for each deploy.

• Robust and easily maintained systems: an issue or a problem in one part of an application does not affect other parts.

• A tool for each job: we only choose technology that fits the job instead of trying to fit everything into one stack/solution.

• Long-term vision without unnecessary complexity: A long-term perspective that does not lead to unnecessary complexity is to provide only what adds value to the client and to design and develop it with a predictable path to future improvements.

To put it simply: our software solutions will continue to work as well in the future (1 year, 5 years, etc.) as they do today.

Conclusion

Microservices are not designed to increase the complexity of your system simply for its sake, but rather as a way to modularise thoughtfully. For microservices to give you the advantages of flexibility, scalability, and resiliency, you must consider how to implement them properly. When implemented correctly, these solutions allow for continued software evolution in line with business growth by providing for gradual and manageable product changes over time.

Rejoicehub LLP provides exactly this type of solution: Future-ready, custom-developed applications that can be expanded to keep pace with customer organisations. Should your organisation already be developing or planning to develop a new software application and does not want to experience the pain of getting a monolithic structure massaged into place, please feel free to contact us. We'll look forward to partnering with you to create a future-ready, robust application that meets your needs.