Microservices provides greater enterprise agility, making it easier to change and develop new services and help businesses to meet quick go-to-market demands.
Traditional applications typically have all the modules tightly coupled in a single process and it cannot be scaled independently. These applications are too long and complex and even a small change in the code involves regression testing and redeployment of the entire application.
Reliability is one of the major setbacks where a bug in a module or any security lapses can potentially bring down the performance of the whole application. Adapting to new technologies with changes in the frameworks or languages affect the entire application consuming time and cost.
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Why Microservices?
- Increased flexibility: If one component of a system fails, the failure doesn’t bring down the entire platform. Irrespective of the root cause, problems can be identified and isolated, without any disruptions to the overall service being provided.
- Scalability: Each service is a separate component and is scalable individually. Business critical services can be deployed on multiple servers based on the demanding availabilities and performance.
- Improved ROI: Multiple teams can work on independent services with quick and easy deployment. Development time is reduced with reusable code. The increased efficiency of Microservices minimizes costs and downtime.
- Ease of Deployment: Since each service is decoupled, it can be upgraded, added with new features and deployed independently without any interruptions to the overall business.
How Microservices change the Integration?
The growing popularity of the SaaS providers in the enterprise business has increased the necessity to integrate multiple services, applications, and providers to support the enterprise.
Microservices as a layer allow integration with the core applications. Business services orchestrate the functionality while data services retrieve the enterprise data and provide it to business services. The Microservice architecture allows each service to cover a unique functionality at a micro level and deploy them independently to have minimal impact on other services during any failures.
The Integration layer of the microservice architecture provides the orchestration capabilities required for different systems to interact with each other. Service orchestrations, data transformations, and protocol switching are the key functionalities. To call multiple microservices to support a given business requirement, we need to build another microservice that will orchestrate the service calls to the required microservices and aggregate the final response and send it back to the consumer.
Once the services and integration layers are implemented, the next logical step is to expose that valuable information to external systems through APIs. If the entire system is dealing with internal systems, APIs are ruled out. Nevertheless, API management plays a vital role to expose services to consumers.
API Management’s Role in Microservices
With an API approach, organizations can expose the functionality of microservices as services itself, which can lead to the creation of both internal and external business values.
To properly expose microservices to client’s applications and to manage all the exposed API endpoints, we need API management tools which will act as a cohesive interface to connect. While we are building Microservices as a collection of micro APIs we need to showcase the endpoints exposed by each service to the client’s applications properly. So, to achieve this, the best way would be to expose a single view to the client by aggregating all the endpoints from each microservice, which reduce the complexity of consuming the API.
API management’s versioning and revisions allow making changes to APIs in a controlled and a safe way. To make changes, just create a new revision, then edit and test the API without disturbing the API consumers. When everything is ready, we can make our revision and simultaneously post an entry to the new changelog, to keep the API consumers up to date with what has changed.
API management provides APIs with authentication and authorization which ensures authenticating calls to the API for registered users, tracks who is making the requests, tracks usage of the API, blocks or throttles any requester who exceeds the rate limits and applies different permission levels to different users. It’s also important to monitor APIs for availability, functionality, speed, and performance. Because APIs that other people rely on should be actively monitored in both pre-production and production environments.
Time to Evolve
As businesses evolve over time with new technologies, enterprises are moving towards microservices. We are looking at the next decade where APIs are being used inside organizations and when exposed outside, they will grow rapidly. Ability to build integrated microservices and manage them via API Management systems efficiently will play a vital role on how agile and competitive an organization can be. With microservices, we can discover innovations that we never thought possible. Gearing up for this future advancement should be in your plans!
