Do you have an immediate need to quickly create digital services, but have longer term goals of simplifying your legacy architecture or expanding your Cloud strategy? Interested in future-proofing your investment?
Microservices aren’t new, but are becoming a more critical part of many enterprise cloud and digital strategies. Touted by analysts like Gartner and Forrester and mega-organizations like Amazon, NetFlix, Nike, and eBay, microservices are finally getting much deserved attention in the technology stack.
What is a microservice and a microservice architecture?
Before we get into some best practices in implementing microservices, let’s take a step back and define what is a microservice.
A microservice is a software component that is decoupled and deployed from your legacy system to run a single business process or individual service. It integrates with well-known interfaces (like an API) and owns its own data storage.
A microservice architecture leaves legacy systems intact for as long as you wish, yet offers freedom to use the microservices for rapid innovation and deployment anywhere, especially the Cloud.
Using tools like OpenLegacy’s microservices edition, building microservices becomes easy and you can even get microservice-enabled APIs from legacy systems in minutes.
How to best use microservices to modernize your legacy system
The architectural style you choose can greatly impact your development, innovation, and business capabilities.
Compared to a monolithic architecture, microservices are easier to build, test, deploy, and update. Red Hat believes it is the answer to the question: how can my business react faster to new demands, rather than being stuck in the multiyear "death march" of traditional software development? Now, different parts of your development team can work concurrently on your products, in an agile manner, and deliver value to your customers immediately, increasing your business capabilities.
The key to digital transformation success is finding ways to access the mission-critical data stored on legacy systems and putting it to work in agile projects.
There was a time when service-oriented architectures (SOA) promised to do just that.
But instead, SOA added another layer of complexity to monolithic architecture. Microservice architecture, on the other hand, bypass the complex mesh of interconnected subsystems that makes up your SOA and gains direct access to the data points in legacy systems.
A microservice architecture combined with APIs makes even the most complex applications easier to develop.
Microservices make testing faster and easier because each unit is self-contained with interfaces to each other. You only need to test the ones that changed. Each microservice is a small, separately loadable entity so deployment is simpler.
By contrast, traditional, monolithic applications require the entire system to be built, tested and deployed together so releases are less frequent and developers wait for the process to be completed. This is a big reason why developing enterprise applications is often seen as a massive effort.
Learn the basics behind microservices, the pros and cons of using them, and even get our help getting started with API integration with our on-boarding services. Click here to learn more.
The benefits of Microservices
| iT benefits |
business benefits |
| Improve modularity making an application easier to understand, develop and test |
Build new products and offerings at a fraction of the time & cost |
| Reduce interdependencies, so updates don’t have unintended consequences |
Quickly iterate and evolve to changing market needs |
| Enables small teams to develop, deploy and scale services independently |
Deliver a unified user experience regardless of channel, device or location |
| Supports agile, DevOps, continuous delivery and deployment |
No more house of cards where one innovation causes unintended issues in other applications |
| Enables large enterprises to create a global API strategy |
Transform IT from a business anchor to an engine accelerating forward |
| Allows more efficient and cost-effective scaling of specific services |
Reduce the cost & time required for larger legacy migration initiatives, so you have more It resources available - sooner |
| Accelerates future legacy migration projects since APIs are already microservices |
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