Why Choose Microservices Over Monoliths?

Business processes are largely dependent upon market-centric requirements. Consumer needs and buying-behaviour evolve over time, and as they do, businesses need to change their product or services model to fulfil the changing consumer demands. In case of software, people had fewer and simpler needs in the past so it was easy to develop specialized software to fulfil consumer-centric demands. 

However, with time, as technologies advanced, businesses started using them to improve the buying experience and create an upper edge in the market for their products by offering “something more” than what their competitors did. This, in turn, urged the competitors to follow suit by employing even more advanced forms of technologies to regain their competitive hold in the market. 

The “dominoes” effect, thus produced, disrupted the manner in which how software was developed and services were made available to end users. The traditional method of building monolithic applications gradually started phasing out, giving way to microservice architectures. 

Rather than building a single, huge application to fulfil all requirements, the entire block of requirements is split up into several sets of smaller, interconnected applications having their own architectures, business logic and databases. Most microservices now employ REST, or REpresentational State Transfer concept in which the client as well as the server are implemented independently of each other - The code on the client-side can be dynamically changed at any time without affecting server operations, and vice versa the code on server side can be updated or changed without affecting how clients work or function.

As long as both the client and the server know about the format of data sent between them, they can be kept modular and separate. The major benefit of separating the client-side from the server is that user interfaces and validation logic can be changed as and when required without affecting server operations. It helps to improve scalability and allows both the client and the server to evolve independently. 

The microservices development model significantly affects the relationship between applications and databases since each service has its own database schema. Databases belonging to individual services are not shared, and this can create a duplication of commonly used data. 

Some mobiles, desktops and web apps exposed to APIs don’t have direct access to back-end services, but instead communicate through API Gateways which are responsible for tasks like access control, caching, load balancing, API metering, and monitoring.