What are microservices and why use them?

Microservices are the future of software development. This approach serves as a server-side solution to development where services remain connected but work independently. More developers are using microservices to improve performance, precision, and productivity, and analytical tools provide them with valuable insights about performance and service levels. 

The argument for microservices is getting louder: Different teams can work on services without affecting overall workflows, something that’s not possible with other architectural styles. In this guide, we’ll take a deep dive into microservices by learning what they are, what they do, and how they benefit your team.

What are microservices?

In software development, microservices are an architectural style that structures applications as a collection of loosely connected services. This approach makes it easier for developers to build and scale apps. Microservices differ from the conventional monolithic style, which treats software development as a single unit. 

The microservices method breaks down software development into smaller, independent “chunks,” where each chunk executes a particular service or function. Microservices utilize integration, API management, and cloud deployment technologies. 

The need for microservices has come out of necessity. As apps become larger and more complicated, developers need a novel approach to development—one that lets them quickly expand apps as user needs and requirements grow. 

Did you know that more than 85 percent of organizations with at least 2,000 employees have adopted microservices since 2021?

Why use microservices?

Microservices bring multiple advantages to teams like yours:

Scalability

Microservices are much easier to scale than the monolithic method. Developers can scale specific services rather than an app as a whole and execute bespoke tasks and requests together with greater efficiency. There’s less work involved because developers concentrate on individual services rather than the whole app.

Faster development 

Microservices lead to faster development cycles because developers concentrate on specific services that require deployment or debugging. Speedier development cycles positively impact projects, and developers can get products to market quicker. 

Improved data security

Microservices communicate with one another through secure APIs, which might provide development teams with better data security than the monolithic method. Because teams work somewhat in silos (though microservices always remain connected), there’s more accountability for data security because developers handle specific services. As data safety becomes a greater concern in software development, microservices could provide developers with a reliable security solution.  

Better data governance

Just like with data security, where teams handle specific services rather than the entire app, microservices allow for greater accountability when complying with data governance frameworks like GDPR and HIPAA. The monolithic method takes more of a holistic approach to data governance, which can cause problems for some teams. With microservices, there’s a more specific approach that benefits compliance workflows. 

Multiple languages and technologies 

Because teams work somewhat independently of each other, microservices allow different developers to use different programming languages and technologies without affecting the overall architectural structure of software development. For example, one developer might use Java to code specific app features, while another might use Python. This flexibility results in teams that are programming and technology “agnostic.”

For example, see how we scaled a stateful microservice using Redis.

Did you know 76 percent of organizations believe microservices fulfill a crucial business agenda?

Microservices architecture

Microservice architecture sounds a lot more complicated than it is. In simple terms, the architecture comprises small independent services that work closely together but ultimately fulfill a specific purpose. These services solve various software development problems through unique processes.

A good comparison is a football team, where all players share the same objective: To beat the other team. However, each player has an individual role to play, and they fulfill it without impacting any of the other players. Take a quarterback, for example, who calls the play in the huddle. If the quarterback performs poorly during a game, this performance shouldn’t affect the other team members. The quarterback is independent of the rest of the players but remains part of the team.

Unlike monolithic architectures, where every component is interdependent, microservices allow each service to be developed, deployed, and scaled independently. 

Did you know the cloud microservices market was worth 1.63 billion in 2024? 

Microservices vs. monolithic architectures

When you’re considering a microservices architecture, you’ll find that they offer a lot of benefits compared to a traditional monolithic architecture approach. They will allow your team to build agile, resilient, and flexible software. On the other hand, monolithic software is inherently complex and less flexible—something it pays to avoid in today’s world of increasingly complex software. 

So, let’s look at why businesses like yours should embrace microservices, and examine a few challenges to look out for.

Microservices architecture advantages

• Agility and speed: By breaking your applications into smaller, independent services, you can speed up development cycles by allowing your teams to work on various services simultaneously, helping them perform quicker updates and release features faster.
• Resilience: Service independence and isolation improve your software’s overall stability since a service going offline is less likely to disrupt other services, meaning your application continues running while you troubleshoot individual service failures.
• Flexibility: Your team can use different technologies and frameworks for different services, allowing them to choose the best tools for specific tasks instead of sticking with a few specific technologies that may not be the right choice.

Monolithic architecture disadvantages

• Complexity and risk: When you build applications as single, cohesive units, your team needs to modify existing codes across several layers, including databases, front-ends, and back-ends—even when you only require a simple change. The process is time-consuming and risky, which adds stress to your team if they need to make regular changes, and a single change can impact entire systems.
• High dependency: When your application is made of highly dependent components, isolating services is more challenging. Changes to one part of a system can lead to unintended consequences across your entire application, resulting in downtime, impacted sales, and negative customer experience.
• Cost and inflexibility: Making changes to monolithic applications requires coordination and extensive testing across your teams, which means you’ll see a slower development process, potentially hindering your ability to respond quickly to problems and market demands.

Microservices in the cloud (AWS and Azure)

Perhaps the cloud is the most critical component of the microservices architecture. Developers use Docker containers for packaging and deploying microservices in private and hybrid cloud environments (more on this later.) Microservices and cloud environments are a match made in technological heaven, facilitating quick scalability and speed-to-market. Here are some benefits:

• Microservices run on different servers, but developers can access them from one cloud location.
• Developers make back-end changes to microservices via the cloud without affecting other microservices. If one microservice fails, the entire app remains unaffected. 
• Developers create and scale microservices from any location in the world. 

Various platforms automate many of the processes associated with microservices in the cloud. However, there are two developers should consider:  

• Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Microsoft Azure

Once up and running, these systems require little human intervention from developers unless debugging problems occur. 

AWS

Amazon pioneered microservices with service-based architecture many years ago. Now its AWS platform, available to developers worldwide, takes cloud microservices to the next level. Using this system, developers can break down monolithic architecture into individual microservices via three patterns: API-driven, event-driven, and data streaming. The process is much quicker than doing it manually, and development teams can create highly scalable applications for clients.

Azure

Azure is another cloud-based system that makes microservices easier. Developers use patterns like circuit breaking to improve reliability and security for individual services rather than tinkering with the whole app.

Azure lets you create APIs for microservices for both internal and external consumption. Other benefits include authentication, throttling, monitoring, and caching management. Like AWS, Azure is an essential tool for teams that want to improve agile software development. 

Did you know the global cloud microservices market is expected to grow from USD 1.84 billion in 2024 to USD 8.33 billion by 2032, with a CAGR of 20.8%?

How are microservices built?

Developers used to package microservices in VM images but now typically use Docker containers for deployment on Linux systems or operating systems that support these containers. 

Here are some benefits of Docker containers for microservices:

• Easy to deploy
• Quick to scale
• Launched in seconds
• Can deploy containers after migration or failure

Microservices in e-Commerce

Retailers used to rely on the monolithic method when maintaining apps, but this technique presented various problems:

• Developers had to change the underlying code of databases and front-end platforms for customizations and other tweaks, which took a long time and made some systems unstable. 
• Monolithic architecture requires services that remain dependent on one another, making it difficult to separate them. This high dependency meant that some developers couldn’t change services because doing so would affect the entire system, leading to downtime and other problems that affected sales and the customer experience.
• Retailers found it expensive to change applications because of the number of developers that required these changes. The monolithic model doesn’t allow teams to work in silos, and all changes need to be tested several times before going ‘live.’

Microservices revolutionized e-commerce. Retailers can now use separate services for billing, accounts, merchandising, marketing, and campaign management tasks. This approach allows for more integrations and fewer problems. For example, developers can debug without affecting services like marketing and merchandising if there’s an issue with the retailer’s payment provider. API-based services let microservices communicate with one another but act independently. It’s a much simpler approach that benefits retailers in various niches. 

Real-world examples of microservices in e-commerce

If you aren’t sure if microservers are the best choice for your company, just look at some of the big players that use microservices to serve their customers worldwide. Here are a few examples that we’ve seen that demonstrate how you can use microservices to build and scale your applications.

Netflix

Netflix began transitioning to microservices after a major outage due to a database failure in 2008 that caused four days of downtime, which exposed the limitations of its monolithic architecture. Netflix started the transition to microservices in 2009 and completed the migration to microservices in 2011. With microservices performing specific functions, such as user management, recommendations, streaming, and billing, Netflix can deploy new features faster, scale services independently based on demand, and improve the overall resilience of its platform.

Amazon

Amazon shifted to microservices in the early 2000s after moving to service-oriented architecture (SOA) to manage its large-scale e-commerce platform. Amazon’s microservices helped it handle different aspects of the company’s platform, such as order management, payment processing, inventory, and customer service. This helped Amazon innovate rapidly, handle massive traffic, and maintain uptime—even during peak shopping periods like Black Friday.

Spotify

Spotify uses microservices to support its platform features like playlist management, search functionality, user recommendations, and music streaming. Spotify’s approach allows the company to innovate quickly, scale individual services based on user demand, and improve the resilience of its platform against failures. Spotify implemented microservices between 2013 and 2014 to handle increasing user demand and feature complexity as it expanded globally.

Airbnb

Airbnb employs microservices to manage its booking platform services for property listings, user authentication, search, reservations, and payments. Implemented between 2017 and 2020, microservices helped Airbnb scale its services as the company experienced massive growth. Airbnb was able to improve performance based on user demand and deploy features more quickly.

PayPal

Since early 2013, PayPal has used microservices to handle payment processing, fraud detection, currency conversion, and customer support services. Microservices helps PayPal offer high availability, improve transaction processing times, and scale its services across different markets and geographies.

How do you monitor microservices?

Various platforms automate the processes associated with microservices, but you will still need to monitor your architecture regularly. As you do, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of software development and how each microservice works with the latest application metrics. Use them to monitor key performance indicators like network and service performance and improve debugging. 

Here’s why you should monitor microservices:

• Identify problems quickly and ensure microservices are functioning correctly.
• Share reports and metrics with other team members and measure success over time. 
• Change your architecture to improve application performance. 

The best monitoring platforms will help you identify whether end-user services are meeting their SLAs and help teams drive an optimized end-user experience.

Tools like LM Envision provide comprehensive monitoring solutions that help you maintain high-performance levels across all your services.

Did you know the cloud microservices market could reach $2.7 billion by 2026? 

Best practices for implementing microservices

As you’ve seen above, microservices will offer many benefits to your business. But they aren’t something you can just substitute in and expect to run flawlessly. Here are a few best practices that will help you implement microservices in your application:

• Start small: Switching to microservices isn’t something you should do all at once. Start small by breaking your application down into smaller components and do it a little at a time. This approach will allow your team to learn and adapt as they go.
• Use automation tools: Use CI/CD pipelines to automate the deployment and management of microservices. Automation reduces the chance of your team making mistakes and speeds up repetitive deployment processes to reduce development time.
• Ensure robust monitoring and logging: Implement comprehensive monitoring and logging solutions so your team can track the performance of each microservice and quickly identify any issues.
• Prioritize security: Each service can become a potential attack entry point with microservices and may be harder to secure and monitor for your team because of the more distributed architecture. Implement strong authentication, encryption, and other security measures to protect the system.
• Maintain communication between teams: Since microservices allow your team to work independently on different parts of the application, it’s crucial to maintain clear communication and collaboration to ensure that all services work together seamlessly.

What are the benefits of microservices? Why do they exist today?

Now that we’ve looked at microservices and a few primary benefits, let’s recap some of them to learn more about why they exist today.

• Greater scalability: Although microservices are loosely connected, they still operate independently, which allows your team to modify and scale specific services without impacting other systems.
• Faster development: Your team can move faster by working on individual services instead of a monolithic application, meaning you can focus on specific services without worrying as much about how changes will impact the entire application.
• Better performance: You can focus on the performance of individual services instead of entire applications, changing and debugging software at a smaller level to learn how to optimize for the best performance.
• Enhanced security and data governance: Using secure APIs and isolated services will help your team improve security by controlling access to data, securing individual services, and monitoring sensitive services—helping facilitate compliance with security regulations like HIPPA and GDRP.
• Flexible technology: You aren’t tied to specific programming languages, frameworks, databases, and other technologies with microservices, which means you can pick the best tool for the job for specific tasks.
• Cloud-native capabilities: Platforms like AWS and Azure make creating and managing microservices easier, which means your team can build, deploy, and manage software from anywhere in the world without having a physical infrastructure.
• Quick deployment: Software like Docker is available to make deploying microservices easy for your team, helping them streamline deployment and ensure microservices run in the exact environment they were built in.

The future of microservices

Microservices are a reliable way to build and deploy software, but they are still changing to meet the evolving needs of businesses. Let’s look at what you can expect to see as microservices continue to evolve in the future.

Serverless Architecture

Serverless architecture allows you to run microservices without managing any other infrastructure. AWS is already developing this technology with its Lambda platform, which takes care of all aspects of server management. 

PaaS

Microservices as a Platform as a Service (PaaS) combines microservices with monitoring. This revolutionary approach provides developers with a centralized application deployment and architectural management framework. Current PaaS platforms that are well-suited for microservices are Red Hat OpenShift and Google App Engine.

In the future, PaaS could automate even more processes for development teams and make microservices more effective.

Multi-Cloud Environments

Developers can deploy microservices in multiple cloud environments, which provides teams with enhanced capabilities. This can mean using multiple cloud providers, and even combining cloud services with on-prem infrastructure (for cases when you need more control over the server environment and sensitive data).

“Microservices related to database and information management can utilize Oracle’s cloud environment for better optimization,” says technology company SoftClouds. “At the same time, other microservices can benefit from the Amazon S3 for extra storage and archiving, all the while integrating AI-based features and analytics from Azure across the application.”

Service mesh adoption

Service meshes are becoming critical for managing more complex microservice ecosystems. They will provide your team with a dedicated infrastructure for handling service-to-service communication. This infrastructure will help improve monitoring, incident response, and traffic flow.

DevOps and AIOps

The integration of DevOps and AIOps with microservices and ITOps will help streamline development and operations. For example, new DevOps tools will help developers automate many deployment tasks instead of manually configuring individual environments. AIOps will also help your team, as it uses AI and machine learning to improve monitoring and reduce the time your team needs to look through data to find problems.

Event-driven architecture

Event-driven architecture is gaining more popularity among microservices because it allows for more de-coupled, reactive systems that are easier to manage. It allows them to process real-time data and complex event sequences more efficiently.

Advanced observability

As multi-cloud environments become more common, more advanced tools are needed to monitor these environments. Hybrid observability solutions will help your team manage hybrid environments to gather performance metrics (CPU usage, memory usage) about your services in a central location and send alerts when something goes wrong. Advanced observability solutions also use AI to monitor environments to ensure your team only sees the most relevant events and trace information that indicates a potential problem.

Before You Go

Microservices have had an immeasurable impact on software development recently. This alternative approach to the monolithic architectural model, which dominated software development for years, provides teams a streamlined way to create, monitor, manage, deploy, and scale all kinds of applications via the cloud. Platforms like AWS and Azure facilitate this process. 

As you learn more about software development and microservices, you’ll discover new skills and become a more confident developer who solves the bespoke requirements of your clients. However, you should test your knowledge regularly to make every development project successful. 

Do you want to become a more proficient software developer? Microservices Architecture has industry-leading self-assessments that test your microservice readiness, applicability, and architecture. How well will you do? Get started now.

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