For a long time, monolithic structures were the only option for building a comprehensive e-commerce presence. However, like every innovation that comes to life, growing and renewed needs also reveal new solutions. The need for creating a seamless customer journey gave rise to an alternative to the monolithic structure, and the microservices structure emerged.
Microservices are the wave of today’s development environment. Now you can create microservices-oriented, cloud-connected applications without reinventing the wheel. It brings huge benefits to companies including agility, scalability, reusability, organizational simplicity, and cost-efficiency.
What are Microservices?
Microservices is a term that’s becoming increasingly used in the software industry. So what are microservices anyway? And how are they different from other application architectures? (Spoiler alert: they’re very different.)
Microservices are independent software modules that are loosely coupled and can be deployed independently without affecting the rest of the project. Unlike the monolithic structure, microservices have a cross-functional design that works together on a single module.
Microservices architecture is built as independent components that communicate with each other using APIs and can be deployed separately. Simply put, API keys are a bridge between all individual microservices focusing on different tasks and also your front end and the back end. They allow you to make easy connections with different systems and applications which allows for seamless and automatic interfacing.
Through this structure, microservices make development more flexible and efficient.
Why Microservices?
Microservices brought refreshing freshness to the software development phase. It’s a clear trend, but what are the real benefits? Are they really worth all the hype? Definitely, yes!
They improve modularity, simplify debugging, increases flexibility, and lessens the chance for introducing dependencies between modules, and much more.
Scale Better, Increase Flexibility and Agility
Microservices architectures enable the development of applications in a manner that is scalable and flexible. Its architecture is overlaid with scale-out characteristics that allow for faster infrastructural capacity as each service is designed and developed to provide a particular aspect of the application.
Microservices-based architectures make it easy to update or renew the product because a bug fix or new feature can be implemented in one small part of the system instead of trying to change the whole product. The application’s scalability can be easily achieved by deploying only a particular service that needs the scale. This greatly reduces time to less than seconds as well as efforts in scaling the application and makes it flexible, resulting in a more cost-effective enterprise. Because, since microservice implementation scales, you can scale the resources as well – like a fluctuating workload or capacity of your entity – to avoid resource wastage.
Especially in campaign periods or holiday seasons, it is crucial to have a scalable infrastructure to handle increasing traffic. We all know that dealing with increased traffic is as important as attracting that traffic to your shopping website.
Continuous Delivery Potential
You can deliver new features faster, reduce the time and cost of software changes, and enable the delivery of applications at scale.
Reducing costs is an important aspect of any business. Microservices help you to save time and money by having a quicker deployment, improved code reusability, and better efficiency. Fast time to market as well as the ability to add and remove features much faster resulting in a reduced cost of development. Allowing you to deploy components independently and obtain faster development cycles brings zero downtime during deployment, thus preventing any loss of revenue.
Using microservices can also allow organizations to break up large projects into smaller chunks that are more manageable and can be built, tested, and deployed independently and much faster than before.
In order to keep up with the changing world of e-commerce and the new features and technologies that are increasing in customer demand, you need an infrastructure that can keep up with your brand’s needs. That’s why it is beneficial to have the microservices architecture to gain the freedom of action that you crave.
Easy Troubleshooting
A major problem with monoliths is that any issue can cause downtime for the entire application. Microservices, on the other hand, are decentralized and decoupled into independent services that are far easier to maintain and build incrementally. Through microservices structure, the entire application will still work even if one of its components experiences an error. It limits the impact of an issue to only the service experiencing it. Thus, decreases your operational overhead and provides having simpler troubleshooting. Faster troubleshooting reduces the downtime of systems and creates happier customers.
As we all know, a happy customer is the key to the success in e-commerce. So, microservices can save time and money for your business while increasing customer satisfaction.
More Secure than Monolithic Software Designs
Independent entities, that the microservices structure provides, prevent your entire system from a security attack, server crash, or leak if it happens in only one part of the application.
Monolithic architecture means that you have a single product. If one security problem occurs, it means that the entire system might be affected. However, the microservices architecture makes it easy to lock down a system. If a breach occurs, you can switch off the affected subsystems instead of having to fix the problem in every part of the system.
How can your brand benefit from all these?
All these features allow a competitive advantage in the rapidly changing market. A microservices-based commerce platform, like Inveon inCommerce offers, enables you to take the most agile actions in the rapidly and ever-changing nature of e-commerce, in making the necessary changes quickly, building the updates that meet the emerging needs, and providing a perfect customer journey.
While working with microservices architecture at Inveon, we highlight domain expertise in our technical teams. Through working with a dedicated team organized around a specific domain for each microservice, we deepen both technical and business know-how in the relevant domain.
Whereas older monolithic approaches need to bundle everything as a single unit, a microservices architecture allows independent delivery of smaller pieces developed by different teams.
The structure creates fast, scalable, reliable, and agile commerce entities and It’s also blazing fast for both loading and response times to deliver a seamless experience for your users. Microservices architecture is currently the hottest framework to power your e-commerce business, and if you’re not on it yet you can be left behind.
If you don’t intend to take the risk, let our consulting experts help you. Contact us today, and we can discuss how microservices architecture can help you to boost your business.
