BUILDING SERVERLESS MICROSERVICE ARCHITECTURE FOR SCALE
Product Development
Feb 08, 2023
Innovify
As the IT industry is constantly changing, the demand for skills and experience is also continually evolving. Over the past year, the demand for employees with knowledge of micro-services has increased by an incredible 133%. As a result, such positions are now among the most popular jobs in IT. At the other end of the scale, jobs that ask for experience in service-orientated architecture are falling in popularity.
Cloud computing service provider Rackspace attributes the decline in demand for SOA directly to the increased popularity of micro-services. Demonstrating just how much of an impact this is having, the significant jump in demand for developers and engineers with relevant experience points to a bright future for the technology.
MICRO-SERVICES
Unlike traditional applications and programmes, micro-services are designed to do one thing, and to do it well. Rather than just being code modules or libraries, it also contain everything from the operating system, platform and framework to runtime and dependencies. Every micro-service that’s created is an independent process with no dependency on other.
One of the major benefits of micro-services is that they can be developed in any programming language. In order to communicate with each other, micro-services use language-neutral protocols like Representational State Transfer (REST) or messaging applications like IBM MQ Light. In order for a micro-service to fulfil its functions, it doesn’t need to know anything about the underlying implementation or the other micro-services that surround it.
SCALABILITY
Well written micro-services offer an exceptionally high level of on-demand scalability. As micro-services function independently, a development team can scale a micro-service component independently of other micro-service components. This enables incredibly efficient use of resources and allows for rapid reactions to changes in workload. This ease of scalability means that micro-services are especially well-suited to cloud-native environments.
Applications that are based on micro-services can be selectively scaled out. This means that, instead of launching multiple instances of the application server, it’s possible to scale out a specific micro-service when necessary. As soon as the load moves to another part of the application, the original micro-service will be scaled in while the new area of demand will be scaled out.
FLEXIBILITY
As well as offering improved scalability, micro-services offer enhanced flexibility. Thanks to its versatility, developers can choose the technologies that work best with a specific micro-services. What’s more, they will be able to mix and match a variety of operating systems, languages, frameworks, runtimes, databases and monitoring tools to create a system that suits their needs perfectly.
If a micro-service is no longer needed in a certain application, it can simply be lifted out and reused elsewhere. Just like Lego blocks, it can be used to build almost anything. This means that, once they’ve invested in a core set of micro-services, organisations can assemble them to build a variety of applications for a range of uses.
The rapid increase in demand for micro-services shows just how useful the technology is to developers and organisations everywhere. Investing in micro-services now could give your business the flexibility it needs and could help it to excel even further.