Why Microservices?

I have a few tidbits about why to use microservices and why it makes sense to create few microservices as a side project and learn from the same. A lot has been said on why you should use microservices in the internet, that said, I look at it from a practical point of view and give you a very basic idea why we should use microservices and stop monoliths from becoming huge mountains of code in the future.

• Simpler codebase(s) — Multiple projects with simpler code to maintain.
• Single responsibility — The microservice has a single responsibility and moves the developer from the mindset of developing everything together into separating multiple functional aspects into separate codebase.
• Test coverage naturally increases — since the codebase becomes smaller, the code coverage increases and bugs are figured out earlier in the development lifecycle.
• Readable codebase — Smaller equals precise and more readable and understandable. You have to understand this is different from simpler codebase because readability is a different aspect in itself.
• More power to the developer — Developers can choose and implement their own languages or databases as long as the other teams can also chip and debug if necessary. So developers get more freedom to do what they want to do — code away!
• Time taken to develop each microservice becomes less.
• Change is less expensive to implement — As the services are small and easily readable and created within days and weeks, the changes to the same codebase becomes really less and better to make those changes and deploy them easily
• Versioning becomes mainstream — incase of APIs, microservices make you follow versioning and it becomes the first nature of developers to implement versioning in their endpoints/REST api endpoints so that other microservices can still depend on the old endpoints. This helps in making versioning an explicit way of programming with microservices.

There are other reasons as well, but the above summarizes why you would need microservices and you can depend on the microservices to build your next project/sideproject. There are complexities as well in orchestrating the microservices, but I will work on them as a post at a later point of time. Meanwhile, you can practice and write your own microservices and play with them. Keep tuned for more posts.

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Originally published at work.jeygeethan.com.

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