Backend microservice architecture is a framework for breaking down applications into smaller, independent services that communicate with one another via APIs. This method promotes scalability, resilience, and modularity in software development. Organisations that design effective microservices systems can easily adapt to changing requirements while maintaining high performance in their backend infrastructure.
So, what is the backend microservices architecture, and what are its three types? Let us continue reading to learn more about the concept.
What Is Backend Microservices Architecture?
Backend microservice architecture is a paradigm shift away from monolithic structures, focusing on breaking down complex applications into smaller, self-contained services.
Google Cloud defines the backend microservices architecture as below:
“A microservices architecture is a type of application architecture where the application is developed as a collection of services. It provides the framework to develop, deploy, and maintain microservices architecture diagrams and services independently.”
Each microservice runs independently, performing a specific business function, and communicates with other services using APIs. This decentralisation promotes agility, scalability, and fault isolation.
You might need to learn the key metrics to optimise your backend systems before we go further into the topic of backend microservices. See our article, “Backend Analytics: Understanding the Fundamentals of System Optimisation“, for more information on that.
What are the Three Types of Microservices?
There are three types of microservices: domain microservices, integration microservices, and unit-of-work microservices.
A microservice, according to Attlasian’s blog, is a function in charge of a single piece of logic (domain microservices are different; see below). Distributed applications are built from several microservices working together.
So what are the functions of each of these types of microservices? Here is the explanation.
- Domain Microservices: These connect services with related features in a loose manner. They are tailored to manage a particular task or aspect of a company. It is not uncommon for different services to handle different aspects of a product catalogue and user authentication, for instance.
- Integration Microservices: With these, seemingly unrelated apps can communicate with one another. The key to their success is their ability to decompose large applications into smaller, more manageable components that can be easily integrated and scaled. This approach also makes maintenance much easier.
- Unit-of-Work Microservices: Singular functions are handled by these. It is possible to build, deploy, and scale each microservice independently, and they are all tailored to carry out different business functions.
Each of these microservices can be written in a variety of programming languages and frameworks, and each service acts as a mini-application on its own. They communicate with each other through well-defined Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).
Components of Microservices Architecture
The components of a backend microservices architecture include the microservices themselves, which are the individual units of functionality, as well as service discovery mechanisms to help locate and communicate with different microservices.
Additionally, there are also monitoring and logging tools to ensure the performance and reliability of the microservices architecture.
Aside from that, here are all of the components of a microservice architecture.
- Microservices: These are the main components of the microservices architecture. They are self-contained services that implement a single business capability.
- Containers: Containers are packages of software that function independently. They provide an environment where microservices can run in isolation, ensuring consistency across multiple deployment environments.
- API Gateway: The API Gateway is the entry point for clients. Instead of calling services directly, clients call the API gateway, which forwards the call to the appropriate services on the back end.
- Service Discovery: This component helps in locating services in a microservices architecture.
- Service Mesh: The service mesh offers a layer of infrastructure that provides additional security and makes for more predictable behaviour in terms of communication.
- Management/Orchestration: This component is responsible for placing services on nodes, identifying failures, rebalancing services across nodes, and so forth.
Every one of these elements is essential to the seamless functioning of a microservices architecture. Together, these elements improve the system’s resilience, scalability, and flexibility. A microservices architecture can handle complex operations and adjust to changing demands by efficiently managing the communication and distribution of services.
Benefits of Backend Microservices Architecture
Backend microservices architecture offers several benefits to organisations, empowering them to build and manage complex applications more effectively. Some of the key benefits include:
- Scalability:
- The microservices architecture allows for individual services to be scaled independently based on specific requirements. This targeted scalability ensures that resources are allocated efficiently, leading to improved performance and cost-effectiveness.
- Agility and Speed of Development:
- Development teams can increase agility and accelerate the development process by dividing large applications into smaller, more manageable services and working on multiple services at once. This shortens the time to market for new features and updates by enabling organisations to innovate and iterate more quickly.
- Fault Isolation and Resilience:
- A single service failure in a microservices environment does not always result in a system-wide outage. Because each service runs separately, fault isolation and resilience are possible. This strategy lessens the effect of failures and improves the system’s overall reliability.
- Technology Diversity and Flexibility:
- Microservices architecture allows teams to select the most suitable technologies for each service, promoting technology diversity and flexibility. This empowers teams to use the best tools and frameworks for specific requirements, fostering innovation and adaptability.
- Improved Maintainability:
- Smaller, focused services are easier to understand, maintain, and update compared to large monolithic applications. This improved maintainability simplifies the debugging and troubleshooting process, leading to more efficient software maintenance and support.
- Enhanced DevOps and Continuous Deployment:
- Microservices architecture aligns well with DevOps practices, enabling continuous deployment and integration. Teams can release updates to individual services without disrupting the entire application, leading to faster innovation cycles and improved collaboration between development and operations teams.
- Autonomy and Team Empowerment:
- Microservices architecture supports decentralised decision-making and empowers development teams to take ownership of individual services. This autonomy fosters a culture of responsibility, innovation, and ownership, leading to increased team motivation and efficiency.
While fostering a culture of innovation and scalability among development teams, backend microservices architecture equips organisations with the flexibility and resources necessary to construct software systems that are scalable, resilient, and easy to maintain.
How to Design an Effective Microservices Architecture
Designing an effective microservices architecture involves several steps and considerations, including:
- Defining Service Boundaries: Determine if the microservices architecture is a good fit based on your requirements. Analyse your requirements to see where you can segment them into functions that provide value.
- Designing Autonomous Microservices: Each microservice should be designed to be loosely coupled, have high cohesion, and cover a single bounded context. Each service should have a separate codebase, which can be managed by a small development team.
- Implementing Communication Patterns: Use APIs and events to communicate between services. Services communicate with each other by using well-defined APIs.
- Managing Data: Services are responsible for persisting their own data or external state.
- Ensuring Security and Compliance: Consider security vulnerabilities within a microservice architecture.
- Testing and Deployment Strategies: Because microservices are deployed independently, it’s easier to manage bug fixes and feature releases.
- Observability and Monitoring: This is crucial for maintaining the health and performance of your microservices architecture.
- Team Collaboration and Best Practices: Build teams around microservices. Each team should have the necessary skills and tools to develop, deploy, and manage a specific service on their own.
That covers everything there is to know about the concept of backend microservice architecture. When creating a backend system, it’s important to stick to optimisation best practices. See the article we wrote, “Backend Best Practices: 7 Things to Do for Performance Optimisation“, to learn more about that.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the architecture of backend microservices is becoming an influential factor in contemporary software development. A major force in the evolution of backend systems, it improves scalability, resilience, and modularity.
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