Insights
Production-ready Microservices simplified with Parkar NexGen Platform
A lot of organizations end-up facing scalability limitations and development velocity comes to a screeching halt. This is the time when they adopt microservice architecture. It is also often the most natural progression for evolving software applications. In our previous blogs, we defined a microservice architecture and what goes into its making. The key aspect, however, is to ensure that microservices are production ready. Let’s delve deeper into what production-ready microservices are all about.
True spirit of microservices adoption
Despite the fact that software systems often embrace microservices as the next major step towards evolution, it is important to remember that they were not built keeping a microservice architecture in mind.
This, in turn, causes problems and hiccups – both organizational and technical in nature.
So what happens at the organizational end?
Well, what you get is isolated teams working on their own set of microservices with zero lack of awareness of what the other teams are up to. Not to mention, the lack of trust between teams who have no idea how other microservices that support their own service are as reliable, stable and scalable.
Having a dedicated staff for operations management in microservice ecosystems will not always be possible. During such times, developers need to step forward and take charge of operational duties for their microservices. It goes without saying that most would be unfamiliar with the tasks and may also be reluctant to do something they have no idea about. As such, organizations need to initiate a lot of cross-team collaboration to ease out things at their end.
Likewise, there are challenges on the technical side too.
There would be compatibility issues between microservices. This would be largely because their functionality was never really defined when the decision was taken to split the monolith into microservices. This may cause a blurring of boundaries and overall communication with respect to collaboration and understanding of each other’s roles.
In addition, for a thriving microservice architecture, it is important that the microservices are extremely refined. This is an important consideration for organizations that are used to running monolith applications and often tend to overlook its significance.
Transitioning to production-ready microservices
Developers need to hone their skills to handle operational tasks well. While it is easy to split dev and ops duties in a typical monolith environment and manage both via separate teams, microservice architecture does not really give you that luxury. And in a way, it’s better that way.
There will be a multitude of microservices within the architecture and dual-staffing these for developers and ops engineers do not really serve the purpose from an organizational perspective. Not to forget the fact that devs move so swiftly in a microservice architecture that having operations engineers to run the services does not make any sense whatsoever. The devs take charge and drive the microservice architecture, they being the ones who know how to run it best.
Also, the organization needs to work hard towards building an application platform infrastructure that’s stable, reliable and sophisticated.
The cost factor while transitioning from Legacy to Microservices Architecture
It becomes necessary for organizations to justify the overhead while transitioning from legacy to microservice architecture. Having said that, companies should do the groundwork mentioned above to ensure they are good candidates for microservices.
In situations where the application is complex but the functionalities are well-defined with very clear boundaries, microservices work incredibly well.
There are situations however wherein an application reaches a point where scalability becomes an issue. These limitations often pose a serious threat to performance and stability, hampering developer velocity in a big way. In such a scenario, which is far too common, it makes sense to bring in microservices and justify the cost without which it would be impossible to scale the application.
Deploying production-ready microservices
You can simply wrap a microservice with all dependencies into a container and deploy it as needed. So you could deploy it on-prem, cloud or any operating system as per the requirement.
Having packed all the runtime dependencies together, you don’t have to worry about runtime environment factors that could lead to costly deployment failures that may occur during deployment in different environments.
This reduces the operational cost to a great extent and instills greater stability. The good thing is that you can repeat deployments of multiple microservices and keep a tab on all of them with the right microservices platform.
Parameters determining production-readiness
There are certain parameters in place or standards that organizations adhere to, in order to ensure the successful adoption of production-ready microservices. Production-ready microservices are often well-equipped to handle any catastrophe and are reliable, scalable, fault-tolerant and stable.
Let’s look at the most important ones:
- Reliability – Organizations need to develop and deploy microservices that can safeguard systems against dependency failures.
- Performance – The critical components must be studied and deployed to ensure greater efficiency and scalability.
- Fault tolerance – It is impossible to prepare microservices to fight catastrophes unless you push them to fail in real-time.
- Monitoring – You need to monitor and log, and study key metrics. On-call procedures and alerts should also be looked into.
- Documentation – Mitigate trade-offs like organizational sprawl and technical debt that are often part and parcel of microservice adoption.
Why Parkar’s NexGen platform?
Often, the frustration and confusion arises from a lack of clarity around microservice architecture and calls for a better understanding of what entails the adoption of microservice architecture. If you think merely putting your application in Docker containers is equal to having microservice architecture, nothing can be further from the truth.
Typically, the microservice architecture can be split into four layers that comprise hardware, communication, application platform, and microservices.
Although the ideal scenario necessitates concerned teams to understand them well, the functionality of Parkar’s NexGen platform makes everything a lot easier.
Using our NexGen platform, from discovery to roadmap to delivery, it’s a 24-week process of application transformation.
NexGen process and technology involves automation, containerization, and microservices to truly transform our client’s journey from legacy to serverless. They get greater agility and flexibility as the Parkar NexGen Platform significantly reduces the migration and development efforts.
A robust microservice architecture factor in all the above concerns in development as well as operational contexts. So, the development teams get clarity at design time while the operations teams build and support the necessary infrastructure to gather data reported by applications and platforms.
When an application is built with the Parkar NexGen Platform, it is quick to spot anomalies and prevent failures way before they occur.
Broad benefits of Parkar NexGen Platform
There is a reason why our customers trust us. Everything about our platform is conceptualized keeping the constant need for speed in mind.
These are the things you can expect from our innovative NexGen Platform:
Greater speed and productivity – Thanks to the platform, different teams can work simultaneously on different projects without having to wait for others to complete a task. Despite excellent collaboration, there is no dependency to hamper work speed or productivity.
Excellent scalability – Each microservice can be written with a different technology which ensures that the task of choosing the right stack for specific needs is uncomplicated. Even decoupled services written in diverse programming languages manage to exist in harmony along with others. So when you decide to scale your solution, you can simply add components or services with ease.
More independence – Development of a massive monolith can never be simple unless you have the capabilities of a platform such as Parkar NexGen. It allows teams to work autonomously around the globe or in tandem with extended teams giving them the independence necessary to make technical decisions quickly within a group.
Unmatched simplicity – Considering that each microservice happens to be a separate chunk of code, it is easier to manage the code. Services can be built, deployed, rebuilt and re-deployed as required and managed independently using the NexGen Platform.
Enhanced capabilities – Services can be easily adapted to be used in multiple contexts, which means you can use the same service in different business processes or across diverse business channels as required. If you decide to assign services to team members, you can easily build a smart, cross-functional team that works together to ensure zero friction and exemplary team spirit.
High security – Every time you need to access a microservice that’s outside of the organization’s network, you are required to open a network port that in turns causes security concerns. This is because when you have several opened ports, you are actually increasing the attack surface. This necessitates a reverse proxy or an API gateway layer so that microservices are guarded against exposure to public networks. NexGen Platform ensures secured data access through enterprise API for third-party data interoperability across the architecture and systems.
The platform offers a robust ecosystem to ensure better deployment and management of microservices. When used properly, it can support several use cases. Production-ready microservices come in handy for organizations that have been used to using different languages, libraries, frameworks, and data storage technologies that can be extremely tedious and time-consuming.
Summing up: Robust Ecosystem to Manage Microservices
Production-ready microservices may be just what you need if you wish to build a robust ecosystem to manage microservices. They give teams the freedom to use technology stacks of their choice and the power to operate independently while ensuring peaceful co-existence. If you wish to know the trade-offs of having production-ready microservices, call us today.
Allow us to assess your environment and we will help you choose solutions and strategies that are right for you.