Should Startups Consider Adopting Microservices for Product Development?

Introduction

In the age of cloud-native application development, microservices are a major talking point among software developers. Technology-driven companies like Amazon, Uber, and Netflix are adopting microservices over monolithic architecture for better business agility. Hence, it’s no surprise that the global market for microservices is predicted to reach $10.86 billion by the year 2027.

Lately, “microservices” is also becoming a must-adopt buzzword among product development startups. With their loosely coupled architecture, microservices are becoming popular among application developers in startups. After all, they are more compatible with delivering applications on the cloud platform.

Besides, as businesses evolve to become agile and adopt DevOps practices, they are naturally moving from the monolithic mode to microservices. To that end, let’s discuss why startups should consider adopting microservices for product development.

What are Microservices in Product Development?

Microservices are a set of smaller and loosely coupled services that communicate using APIs. This approach is in direct contrast to the monolithic architecture that is tightly coupled and comprises a single service. Monolithic applications are difficult to scale along with the increase in features and code base.

On the other hand, microservices-based applications use multiple independent components that run every application process as a service. Using lightweight APIs, these services can communicate through an API interface.

Here are some of the unique characteristics of microservices:

Modularity

Modularity is the core feature of microservices. This means that application can operate as a suite of smaller services, each of which can deploy independently and run its processes.

Autonomous

This means that application developers can create, deploy, operate, and scale each service in the microservices architecture without impacting other services. Effectively, services do not share their code or implementation with other services.

Specialization

This characteristic means that every service has its specialized capabilities. Hence, it can focus on solving a specific business problem. As services become more complex, they can be divided into smaller services.

How do microservices benefit product development? Let’s discuss that next.

Benefits of Microservices in Product Development

Camunda Research reports that 63% of enterprise-level companies use the microservices architecture in their product development. Here are some of the benefits of microservices in product development:

1. Agility

The microservices approach encourages development companies to create smaller independent teams that can take complete ownership of services. Smaller teams can understand the context of their work and work more independently. This leads to short development cycles and increased agility.

2. Compatible with Agile Environment

As compared to monolithic architecture, microservices are more compatible with the agile culture. For instance, this approach focuses on individual services, rapid iterations, continuous development & testing, and cost-effective development.

3. Service-Specific Development and Testing

Thanks to their service-oriented architecture, microservices enable organizations to create individual teams to work on specific services. These services cater to all elements, including product development, testing, maintenance, and deployment. Thus, every delivered service benefits from focused and dedicated attention.

4. CI/CD Support

Continuous development and integration (CI/CD) is core to the DevOps philosophy. Microservices supports CI/CD, where cross-functional teams can develop, test, and troubleshoot services independently. Thus, organizations can benefit from faster deployment and shorter turnaround times.

5. Improved Scalability

Scalability is necessary for growing businesses. With microservices, startups can deploy services to multiple servers, thus improving scalability and performance. Development teams can scale individual services independently and also add (or test) new components without any downtime or redeployment.

Next, let’s discuss how to implement microservices in product development.

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