Why is microservice perfect for DevOps?
Software development involves new requirements and goals emerging unexpectedly, as well as multiple changes to requirements. To deal with such a reality, teams must deal with such a dynamic environment. Requirements change not only because of software defects but also because of external pressures, like a new competitor.
To deal with such changes in a timely fashion manner, companies had to abandon monolith software development methods and adopt Agile and DevOps approaches. The most common architecture aligned with Agile and DevOps approaches is microservices, which are multiple loosely coupled services. In this article, we will discuss the role of microservices in the DevOps process.
A little bit of history…
The microservice architecture emerged from a common set of DevOps ideologies. Big companies such as Amazon, Netflix, Facebook, and Google started building their applications with monolithic architectures, which were then decomposed into many small interconnected services that communicated via RESTful APIs and other messaging protocols [2]. Surprisingly, DevOps and microservices have evolved beyond the simple transformation of monolithic applications into decomposed services.
It was observed that such companies had similar organizational structures and development cultures [2]. Despite using a microservices-based architecture, they needed a development model that could fit their needs of high demand for development, speed, and scalability; hence, they were using agile development.
The rapid adoption of agile and DevOps methods helped to grow another concept also supported by a microservices-based development cycle, namely Continuous Integration (CI). Consequently, microservices were used as a driver to achieve more frequent software releases, leading to the practice of Continuous Delivery (CD). The focus of CD is to build potentially shippable product increments, which speeds the deployment pipeline, resulting in changes going to production as quickly as possible.
Why is microservice perfect for DevOps?
The microservices architecture allows organizations to break down an application into small interconnected services, is perfect for DevOps for many reasons [1].
- It allows delivery teams to tackle individual services, simplifying development, testing, and deployment.
- It streamlines the DevOps process and increases productivity and quality of the application by moving development to a flexible and scalable architecture.
- It increases the application’s reliability since a fault with a microservice will only affect that microservice and its users.
- It increases the application availability because releasing a new version of a specific microservice requires very little downtime.
- It can leverage the agile methodology in which the application development effort is divided across teams that are smaller and independent.
- It allows teams to choose the best toolset that fits their needs. This toolset can establish common terminology, and processes for requirements, dependencies, and problems. This helps the Devs and Ops teams to work together by building configuration and building scripts that follow such processes.
Open source microservices and DevOps tools
To help you to take the maximum of DevOps and microservices, here are some open source tools.
- The TARS framework is a microservices framework that will help you to speed software development by accepting different programming languages, message protocols, and integration with different DevOps tools.
- Docker is an open source platform to build, ship, and run an application, or microservices, as a lightweight container.
- Istio is an open source service mesh that allows you to apply networking policies like security, encryption, observability, and telemetry across all microservices.
TL;DR: DevOps and microservices together can make organizations more productive, innovating faster, and at a lower cost.
About the author:
Isabella Ferreira is an Ambassador at TARS Foundation, a cloud-native open-source microservice foundation under the Linux Foundation.
References
[2] https://www.mulesoft.com/resources/api/microservices-devops-better-together
