Microservices Architecture: Best Practices for Mobile App

The concept of mobile app development is increasing at a fanatic pace and the B2B industry is not an exception. The world has become extremely competitive like never before. Forget about succeeding, even surviving in today’s fast-paced landscape can be quite a challenge. No wonder businesses all across the globe are gearing up and trending towards the latest technological advancements, which we will be discussing further in the following post. Yes, here we will focus on microservice architecture, what it is, how it is beneficial, and the best practices to consider for developing robust and scalable mobile apps.

Introduction

Microservice architecture often known as microservices is an architectural style that successfully structures an application in such a way that it forms a seamless collection of services that can be deployed independently as well as coupled loosely. These kinds of services are precisely well organized based on different business capabilities.

So basically it’s an architectural and organizational approach used to enhance the software development procedure in such a way that it can easily communicate over well-defined APIs. Self-contained teams tend to own these kinds of services. What exactly happens when you try incorporating microservice architecture in the software development procedures?

• Easy to scale

• Easy to get started with

• Quick to develop

• Seamless innovation

• Quick time to market

As mentioned above, Microservice architecture successfully extends to loosely coupled services which can be successfully developed, deployed, and maintained independently. Now each of these services is responsible for conducting discrete tasks and has the potential to communicate with other services using a simple API. It may also interest you to know that it is possible to solve larger complex business problems now.

So what happens is that an application is divided into distinct tasks and services. Now each one of these is created independently tends to run a unique process and has the potential to manage its own database. Right from alerts to log data support, user interfaces, handling user identification or authentication, and performing different computing processing tasks.

Earlier, if we take a look at the traditional monolithic architecture, it did include all the same kind of fundamental assortments, tasks, and services that are required to fulfill the application’s ultimate objective, just there was a slight difference. Those functions consisted of a single, large, all-in-one executable application. Today’s microservice architecture is thoroughly designed to perform many of the same jobs performed by monolithic application designs just with a bit of twist and update.

The microservices paradigm offers development teams a more decentralized approach to developing software than ever before. Moreover, here it is possible to isolate, rebuild, test, redeploy, and manage tasks pretty independently. For example, let’s say a program isn’t generating proper reports, the IT staff can trace

the problem and test and restart, patch, and redeploy services.

Components of Microservice architecture

Here down below I would like to mention some of the most discrete components of microservice architecture.

• Unique components - Here services are successfully designed and deployed as individual components. What happens is these are set together to accomplish a specific function and address any kind of specific requirement.

• Decentralization - Different microservices components tend to have few or no dependencies. Now this is quite a different story that loose coupling requires frequent and extensive communication between components.

• Resilient - These kinds of services are mainly designed for maximum fault tolerance. It is possible for a single service failure to disable an entire application. So here what’s needed is excellent software design and site reliability engineering practices such as high scalability techniques.

• API-based - Microservice architecture successfully relies on API and API gateways to facilitate communication between components and other existing applications.

• Data Separation - Each service accesses its own database or storage volume.

• Automation - Microservices application components can be cumbersome especially when it comes to deploying on a manual basis. Now this architecture mainly relies on automation and orchestration technologies which leads to successful component deployment and scaling.

Benefits of Microservice Architecture

1. Great scalability

The first and foremost benefit of using Microservices architecture is that it ensures a great amount of scalability. Here each kind of service runs independently, so if you want to add or remove, update or scale cloud microservice, it becomes way easier to do so. All such kinds of tasks can be performed without any disruption to any other kind of service or system.

Organizations irrespective of size and industry verticals can scale microservices in regards to their needs and requirements. Let’s say it's the seasonal buying period then you can try devoting more and more resources for the specific time being. And if the demand drops then microservices can be successfully scaled back enabling resources to be used in other areas.

2. Enhance Team’s Productivity and Efficiency

The next benefit of using the microservice architecture is that it somehow successfully enhances the team’s overall productivity and efficiency. You see this kind of service architecture enables teams to concentrate on a particular service’s development, deployment and maintenance. And with the severe adoption of these kinds of services, developers no longer feel burdened here. These kinds of services foster ownership and expertise within teams enabling team members to make specialized decisions and maintain a high quality of service within their domain.

3. Quick Deployment Time

The next benefit of considering microservice architecture is that it ensures quick deployment time. Unlike other approaches, microservices architecture ensures faster releases since each service involves and deploys independently. So what happens is, with the change in coordinates, the risk and time automatically get reduced across the entire application.

Decoupling services in such a manner definitely enhances agility. A wide range of updates can be rolled out or fixed in case a minor disruption takes place.

4. Reusability

The very next benefit of considering microservice architecture is high-end reusability. Yes, the applications based on microservice architecture are seamlessly shareable across a wide range of businesses. Let's see your app comprises a wide range of areas then it is possible to use a microservice application with a login or a payment option.

5. Cost-Effective Approach

Last but certainly not least, Microservices architecture works wonders when it comes to resource allocation and maintenance since teams tend to work on small and well-defined services. Moreover, here teams tend to focus on specific functionality ensuring resources tend to be used without redundancy or excess capacity.

Top 3 Companies Using Microservice Architecture

#1 Amazon

The first and foremost company to take into consideration is Amazon. It may quite interest you to know that the retail website was a monolith with tightly knit connections. So in other words, developers here were supposed to work very carefully ensuring that nothing broke every single time an upgrade or upscaling activity was undertaken.

And this could never be an exception, slowly and steadily, several tech startups began adopting the methodology when developing robust, scalable, and unique applications. Even large-scale companies using the monolithic architecture shifted successfully.

With the time passing by as the demand for the project or product increased, Amazon began adding more and more developers and the codebase grew like never before and for the better. As a result, the architecture became more and more complex to modify, and adding overheads could easily slow down the software development lifecycle.

With the time passing by, Amazon’s customer base grew and the development team wasn’t able to keep up. Delays, service interdependencies, and coding challenges did hold the company and its services back just to keep up well with the rapid expansion of its customer base.

Finally, the company decided to adopt service-oriented architecture, which turned out to be a significant step towards technological advancements. No wonder Amazon is the distributor ensuring organizations to adopt microservices in an easy manner.

#2 Netflix

And the next company is Netflix. It may quite interest you to know that much like Amazon, even Netflix is a pioneer of Microservice architecture. The migration began way back in 2008 especially after the most-streamlined platform had to face numerous scaling issues and service outages.

It may quite interest you to know that even the primary data of the company was corrupted leading to a three-day blockage on DVD shipping to members. After a quick realization, the platform successfully adopted highly reliable cloud-based distributed systems that were horizontally scalable. No wonder, Netflix chose Amazon Web Services to achieve its migration goals.

This is how Netflix refactored its monolithic architecture into microservices. Today, the popular video streaming platform successfully caters to 210 million subscribers worldwide and keeps on growing fanatically without any challenges and hurdles.

#3 Uber

Last but certainly not least, much like Amazon and Netflix, Uber also performed a major shift from its monolithic structure due to an increased amount of hurdles and issues such as inefficiency in the development and launch of new features, inability to fix unnecessary and unwanted bugs, and so more. It reached a point where the need to hire extensively experienced app developers increased.

Uber chose cloud-powered microservices where services could successfully communicate with each other using an API gateway. Slowly and steadily, the overall team performance scaled up fault tolerance was improved and it was possible to update individual services without disrupting the rest of the application.

Best Practices to Use Microservice Architecture for Developing Scalable Mobile Apps

1. Define the Scope

The first and foremost thing to take into account is defining the scope. Here software developers tend to focus on the boundaries of your microservices and the different microservices each functionality provides. Just keep each microservice well-focused on a specific business function to remain modular and can be successfully developed, deployed, and maintained independently.

2. Use lightweight communication protocols

The next best practice for using microservice architecture for developing highly scalable apps. Microservices successfully interconnect or communicate with each other using a wide range of APIs and that’s the reason why using lightweight communication protocols such as HTTP and RESTful APIs is important.

These kinds of protocols turn out to be extremely simple and easy to use which means conducting a scalable development project using such protocols is an easy catch. Moreover, using microservice architecture successfully reduces communication overhead resulting in the entire system working in a faster and more efficient manner.

3. Choosing the right technology stack

The next best practice that must be taken into account is using the right technology stack. You see this might sound pretty basic but works wonders when done in the right manner. Try choosing a technology that is easy to get started with, quite scalable, and reliable. In case, you find yourself overwhelmed seeking around for the right tech stack, it is advisable to hire a reputable and reliable software development company that has a proven track record of working on a wide range of technology stacks including Java, Node.js, and Go. You see picking a tech stack right in accordance with your well-suited mobile app requirements, and the one which your development team is well-versed with.

4. Ensure supreme scalability

Ensuring high-end scalability and flexibility in today's times especially when it comes to mobile app development seems to have become a great necessity. Microservice architecture seems to have a huge scope for horizontal scaling enabling separate individual services. Just to make sure that each microservice is highly scalable, it is recommended each service be stateless and independent which means handling an increased amount of traffic without hampering other services within the system is a doable job.

5. Secured API gateways

The next practice that must be taken into consideration is secured API gateways. In today’s times when security breaches keep on happening every now and then, integrating third-party tools or products to enhance security. Here the best practice is for managing and controlling API access. Make sure to include a centralized entry to manage authorizations and traffic encryption.

Secured API gateways lead to better engagement and defined user movements.

Final Words

So that’s all for now! These are some of the best aspects to take into account when it comes to microservices future trends. I hope the following post provides great assistance in planning the architecture in tandem with the emerging requirements.