Microservices offer a number of benefits over the traditional multi-tier, monolithic architectures. Let’s list down them:
With microservices, architects and developers can choose fit for purpose architectures and technologies for each microservice (polyglot architecture). This gives the flexibility to design better-fit solutions in a more cost-effective way.
As services are fairly simple and smaller in size, enterprises can afford to experiment with new processes, algorithms, business logic, and so on. It enables enterprises to do disruptive innovation by offering the ability to experiment and fail fast.
Microservices enable to implement selective scalability i.e. each service could be independently scaled up or down and cost of scaling is comparatively less than monolithic approach.
Microservices are self-contained, independent deployment modules enabling the substitution of one microservice with another similar microservice, when the second one is not performing as per our need. It helps in taking right buy-versus-build decisions which are often the challenge for many enterprises.
Microservices help us build systems that are organic in nature (Organic systems are systems that grow laterally over a period of time by adding more and more functions to it). Because microservices are all about independently manageable services – it enables to add more and more services as the need arises with minimal impact on the existing services.
Technology changes are one of the barriers in software development. With microservices, it is possible to change or upgrade technology for each service individually rather than upgrading an entire application.
As microservices package the service runtime environment along with the service itself, this enables having multiple versions of the service to coexist in the same environment.
And finally, microservices also enable smaller, focused agile teams for development. Teams will be organized based on the boundaries of microservices.