Further to our last article, let us deep dive into the agility of technology infrastructure. In many organizations, the ability to transform and reorient the applications, make minor enhancements takes months due to the rigidity of the technology stack and mindset of the resources. I was talking to one of my ex-colleague working with the IT division of a bank and he was narrating stories on how hard it is even to upgrade the version of the browser in the employees’ machines as it impacts so many applications. The effort for any changes induces a butterfly effect where testing efforts multiply on an exponential basis.
Technology agility comes with the ability to manage smaller pieces without major impact on the rest of the ecosystem. As they say, you cannot eat an elephant in one piece, the technology orientation has to dissect larger applications or solutions into a group of smaller pieces that can be managed without impacting other smaller applications. In technical terms, we call it microservices where each service can be run independently without impacting the other. In simple terms, you can have an application for login and profile management and that works when your application for video streaming is down due to some issues.
What is Microservice?
- Microservices enable building single-purpose applications that can be packaged to address larger use cases via big sized applications. Each microservice is generally built around a set of business capabilities and is independently deployable.
- Microservices architecture from a theoretical perspective implies, developing any software application as a suite of small, niche-focused, independently deployable services.
- The Microservices approach has been successfully adopted by organizations like Netflix, Google, Amazon, McDonald, and others. The transformation not only improvises the eCommerce process but also enables digital platforms with innovative ways of goods, services, and experiences to customers at scale and in real-time.
- Adopting micro-services allows organizations to achieve greater agility at lower costs along with inherent granularity and re-usability
- Automation and agile development are other major by-products of microservice orientation.
Benefits of Microservice Orientation:
- Microservice Architecture aligns with business and transforms business services in an agile fashion.
- Business processes and transactions are automated with the composition of microservices which allows us with rewriting only the process to be changed or newly introduced while the other services are on the go
- Provides ease and speed with which the organization can change can determine the ability to react to trends in the industry and maintain a competitive advantage
- With solution logic as composable services form, the organization can run at a pace of business and match business changes with an agile response in delivery.
- As business gets transformed digitally, there are many chances for the incorporation of changes or replacement in application features which can be done with ease with microservice architecture.
