Suppose you are a fresh business graduate looking to work in the tech industry. You start applying to various companies for a job and visit technology sites and blogs to read and enhance your rudimentary tech knowledge. You come across alien terms like React and MongoDB, microservices, Docker, and Kubernetes and you wonder what those terms even mean. Let’s find out what microservices are and how they evolved. We will also discuss how Docker and Kubernetes combine to work together.
Let’s start.
The Evolution of Microservices
Before discussing microservices, let’s talk about monolithic architecture.
A monolithic program is large and has the application’s codebase consolidated in one location. It has some advantages, like requests not needing to make repeated calls across multiple networks. And some disadvantages as well, including strong code coupling that makes it difficult to split individual capabilities into separate logic.
It is very challenging to operate monolithic applications on a single machine due to their enormous size and power requirements.
The technique of scaling up components of an application experiencing high workloads is called service architecture. It was formerly thought to be the solution to huge code bases. Multiple operating system instances, each of which is capable of running a service, can be hosted on a single data server using the service architecture.
In a monolithic architecture, there are additional levels of infrastructure for engineers to handle, which results in hardware and server issues. Cloud Computing (Ec2), a web service released by Amazon, enables programmers to rent virtual machines inside Amazon’s data centers while Amazon takes care of hardware issues.
The virtual machine host, where the application’s code operates, is now the center of programmers’ attention. However, this approach is ineffective because the code typically operates at or below its maximum capacity for virtual machines, making it very wasteful.
Containers, like Docker, are virtual machines that can conceivably be divided into several filesystem regions, each of which can house a program or a portion of an application in its own container.
What are Microservices?
Microservices are containers of varying sizes, each providing its own functionality or service. It is an architectural approach employed in developing high-performance software. The microservices architectural approach divides an application into smaller services, with each service using lightweight protocols like HTTP for communication.
The significant benefit of this approach is that it enables you to design and deploy application services independently of each other, thus making their management and maintenance more convenient and efficient.
Here are some of the benefits of using microservices.
- Increased efficiency and low costs
- Improved scalability and agility
- Reduced time to market
- Quicker updates and easier maintenance
- Enhanced fault tolerance
- Independent deployment
- Increased modularity
Kubernetes
Every solution seeks to address a unique set of issues. Disorganization followed the inevitable emergence of containers. The management of thousands of microservices simultaneously is quite challenging, which is why Google developed the open-source Kubernetes project.
Engineers may consolidate their containers with Kubernetes and make these services portable. The clusters of these centralized containers, known as Kubernetes, power the application. Clusters group all necessary services and the application’s dependencies. This makes it relatively simple to transport, manage, and scale applications.
Containers can run simultaneously on several machines thanks to the Kubernetes clusters. This is highly advantageous for businesses that host massive volumes of data.
Google is an apt illustration of a business employing Kubernetes. Google simultaneously launches numerous versions of any one of its applications, including YouTube. Each instance, which is a running instance of an application in a cluster, is also known as a pod. To ensure continuous uptime, Google updates YouTube one individual YouTube pod at a time.
Docker
So, where does Docker fit into all of this, then? Engineers can create and deploy apps inside packed files inside containers using Docker. These are the same containers that successfully deploy applications of the same version on any computer.
How Docker and Kubernetes Combine
Docker and Kubernetes complement one another to distribute containerized apps. With the help of Kubernetes, docker-created containers are organized into pods and run according to the machine’s resources or the needs of each individual container.
The scalability of applications has improved considerably due to the influx of users and data. Engineers only need to add extra containers to the Kubernetes clusters. Both Kubernetes and Docker are unfinished tools that work together to build and manage large-scale applications; they are not distinct solutions.
Conclusion
Today, most software development companies use the microservices architectural approach due to its incredible benefits. Given the breakneck speed at which technology is evolving, the need to scale and update applications has increased tremendously. Microservices enable you to quickly meet the changes in customer demands and changing market dynamics.
As the microservices architectural approach gains popularity, it might even overtake traditional development methods in the future.
If you want to know more about Xavor’s microservices application development services, contact us at [email protected].