Microservice by name is easier to understand what does it mean. We can consider a simple example of a company distributing its tasks in several departments. So, every department is a Microservice loosely coupled with others but has a specific responsibility. It’s that simple!
In software development, Microservice is a specific business architecture to collaborate as standalone governance that makes the entire system scalable, resilient, maintainable, and flexible.
Visualization of the Architecture:
Let’s consider a real-time application to visualize the architecture of a system Microservices. An e-commerce platform can be an ideal example to show Microservice architecture. Users (customer, vendor, admin), Inventory, and Shipment are some basic features of an e-commerce platform. Without thinking about the Microservices, they unite to perform as a platform under a single umbrella. No decentralization, one database, and one core backend to manage all operations.
Now visualize the same application with implementing the Microservices that work as an independent feature. Isolating them means letting them have a separate deployment with a standalone database.
Why should you use the architecture?
- Every feature is relatively small to maintain, deploy and update changes.
- Easy to understand for a new developer.
- Isolate errors from other services.
- The service delivers maximum productivity.
- Independent to add/upgrade any stack that requires no commitment with the core system.
- Help to extend business without the headache of existing feature conflicts.
Why not?
- Increase deployment headache for several Microservices.
- Enhance complexity to co-relate between features.
- Possible duplicate code over services.
- Increase cost for deployment. Every service requires a separate deployment where without Microservice, one deployment could manage all features.
How does API gateway integration simplify Microservices?
The main challenge of managing Microservices is handling HTTP protocols over different destinations. Also, consumers may require information based on their membership with a different response.
- API gateway simplifies Microservices in different ways depending on the requirements.
- API EP is the starting point to process requests and responses over different services.
- API EP manages global functionalities like authentication/authorization over different services.
- API EP helps Microservices aggregate data from a different database.