Microservices: Definition, Benefits, and Drawbacks.

Microservice is an architectural approach to build any application with the use of small (micro) services in it. For example, if we want to build an e-commerce store, we can either build it using the monolithic development approach or microservices approach.

Imagine you are building an application that has many different features, and there are millions of users using it. For some reason, if something went wrong with the server, DB, or because of any reason your server goes down, you can imagine your whole application will be down and it could cause inconvenience to the users and many other losses to the application owner.
With the use of microservices, we can prevent any application go down at once. At once, I mean, if something went wrong with any of the services it will only stop that particular service of the application and the other services/features can work smoothly without any issue.

Benefits

There are many benefits of building any large application using microservices. With the use of this architecture, we can build any kind of applications.

1. Highly Maintainable and Testable
2. Services are loosely coupled with each other
3. Independent Deployment
4. Capable of being developed by small teams

The other benefits of this approach are:

1. The services can be built with any technologies, they are totally independent of the other services.
2. Developers can use any database based on the services and their uses.
3. Practice CI/CD without any issue.
4. It makes applications more scalable.
5. New team members can quickly become productive.

Drawbacks

There are many benefits of using microservice architecture for the applications but there are also some drawbacks of using it.

1. Developers must deal with the additional complexity of creating a distributed system even they want it or not.
   1. Inter-service communication – In the microservices approach, multiple services can have their own way of managing data. For building any new services developer, they have to understand the other services to communicate and make it work.
   2. Multiple services- Developers have to face another challenge to implement requests that span multiple services at a time and this process could be more complex.
   3. Testing – Testing among the interaction of the services could be challenging.
   4. Team Coordination – Teams have to frequently discuss with the teams of other services to build interactions among the services.
   5. Tools – There are fewer tools/IDRs are there for this approach. Most of the tools are available for the monolithic approach of building application.
2. Deployment Complexities: It could be harder to manage the application services in productions as compared to the monolithic application.
3. Increased Memory Consumption: In microservices, each service has its own database(if required), and that causes the duplication of data. Duplication of data happens to prevent the services to become less dependent on other services.

At Coffee To Business, we always focus on building applications with the best approach, so that applications can be easy to scale as per the business requirements.
Feel free to ask questions if you have,
Thanks.