What is Microservices Integration?

As microservices gain traction in the IT world, you might be curious about pursuing microservices integration within your own organization.

Beyond its ability to control costs, increase responsiveness and accelerate the speed of innovation, microservices can better empower your IT team to improve every aspect of your company's tech-dependent processes, whether or not they're visible to your customers.

What are microservices?

Before discussing the benefits of microservices, it's important to answer the following questions:

• What are microservices?
• What are microservices used for?

To define microservices and how they differ from monolithic IT structures, think of a string of classic holiday lights. When one bulb goes out, all of the lights go dark. This is an example of a monolithic IT structure. Every single process is built to work together, and if one piece fails, everything could go dark.

Of course, holiday lights have gotten better over time. If one bulb goes out today, you only lose that one bulb. This is microservices—an IT structure where everything works together and remains intact and responsive, even if a piece or two isn't working or is being upgraded.

While the holiday lights analogy is an oversimplification, it illustrates why microservices integration is becoming more mainstream in IT. In an economy where customers expect—and in some cases even demand—a frictionless experience delivered with speed and ease, microservices can empower your IT department to rapidly innovate where needed and improve the user experience faster than ever.

How do microservices connect to business operations?

Let's say you run an e-commerce business that has everything from your customer information to your payment gateway built into a single monolithic system. If you run a Black Friday sale and your payment gateway is overloaded with orders, customers could have a sluggish experience everywhere on your site because payments are slowing the entire system down. Not only is this bad for business, but it's also bad for customer faith—and you'll likely see a lot of abandoned carts. Your monolithic system, therefore, costs you money.

However, if your system was built using microservices, each aspect that powers your e-commerce experience would be a separate microservice: Inventory, customer information, payment gateway and shipping are all separate apps but are in constant communication through application programming interfaces.

With this same Black Friday sale, the payment gateway can immediately bring additional bandwidth online because the payment app is built to manage it. Customers can enjoy a seamless shopping and checkout process, and your inventory gets where it needs to go. In this scenario, microservices integration increases your bottom line.

The power of microservices is that you can put apps to work servicing various business operations and departments. For example, both your warehouse and customer service departments can use the same customer information microservice for their needs. When your IT department makes an improvement to the microservice, both departments can immediately benefit and improve the customer experience.

What are the benefits of microservices integration?

The most significant advantages of using microservices are agility, efficiency and reusability. Here's how each can benefit your organization.

Agility

With a monolithic system, you're essentially managing a giant. It's a huge task for your IT department to make even the smallest upgrade or update, and they likely need to take the entire system offline for implementation. This is a slow, unwieldy process that slows business and process cadence as your IT team is bound by the giant's limits. As a result, the bigger the giant gets, the more difficult it is to scale.

With microservices, the giant becomes more manageable because it's broken into separate, smaller apps that communicate to perform larger functions. When customer feedback or an update to a primary shipping provider necessitates a change to the giant, the teams dedicated to these functions can quickly get to work. When solutions are ready, they can deploy the updated app, thus increasing your IT team's agility—and your company's agility as well.

Efficiency

Monolithic systems have several features that decrease efficiency. Not only does all programming need to be in the same language, but every improvement must also go into the same giant funnel for development and deployment. And the larger the funnel, the slower the process of moving things through it. This creates an inefficient system because all updates compete to move through that one and only funnel. And when deployments need to happen, they need to be scheduled so they don't impact revenue-generating operations.

Microservices break this giant funnel down into several smaller funnels, with each funnel having a dedicated team to manage development and deployment. With smaller funnels, improvements can be addressed and deployed into the system faster because deployments don't have to wait on the entire system. Rather, they can be pushed into action when ready without impacting other microservices. Revenue-generating activities stay operational because the system is more efficient at processing change.

Reusability

Once a microservices app is developed, it can be used by IT to benefit almost any department in your organization. Giving your IT department the flexibility it needs to develop microservices that support business operations will empower them further by letting them reuse work already completed to speed additional innovation and scale. They can use IT best practices to build new microservices faster based on existing apps, bring new capabilities online by working with existing microservices and help your company stay ahead of the competition.

Microservices integration can be your ticket to a more nimble business model. Imagine the capability to better respond to customer needs, deploy improvements with deft speed and empower your IT team to build every microservice without the burdens of a single language demand or giant monolith dictating the rules of engagement. While it's a move that's not without its costs, the benefits could pay dividends for decades to come.