Jan. 30, 2023
Read time: 2 minutes and 46 seconds.
tags:You probably use microservices every day without realizing it. They’re the tiny engines powering the apps you love. And they happen to be incredibly powerful. I’ve seen firsthand how they’re revolutionizing backend development and how we connect our devices.
Think about using the Amazon app. Every click, every page, every search – that’s often a microservice at work. Especially as you interact with different parts of a service, you’re getting a dedicated worker that performs a given action or handles a set of filters.
When you click on “Daily Deals,” a specific microservice springs to life, whether it’s a router, an API, a button handler or even the entire interface.
A microservice can display images, text, and handles all interactions within that section. This modularity is key for keeping you happy since it’s what helps you get your answers quickly and efficiently. This means that instead of one giant, monolithic application, you have a bunch of smaller, independent services helping you get them deals on Amazon. Or retrieve your dedicated, custom newsfeed on Facebook. Each service does one thing and does it well.
Microservices aren’t just about breaking things down. It’s also about how you manage them. That’s where Docker and Kubernetes come in with an incredibly synergistic relationship between the two. Docker lets you package your microservice and all of the corresponding dependencies (like that pinball game windows used to come with). Then you have something like Kubernetes helps you manage and scale these containers to work en masse. Instead of relying on one massive serve, you can have a swam of containers and systems that work together to solve a problem. It’s quite fascinating really. This is important for handling peak loads, especially when you have things like Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales, Boxing Day or anything alike.
You can spin up multiple instances of a microservice when demand is high, then scale back down when things quiet down. This is thanks to the magic of orchestration. You can do a lot of these things thanks to revolutionary techs, like Docker and things like Kubernetes.
Even if you’re not a developer, understanding microservices is helpful. They’re shaping the digital world around us, especially as we get more demanding from our technology. Think about the need for answers quickly and efficiently. We have computers and servers that answer our very queries very quickly and interface with us in a way that is natural for us, but not for a machine. Our demanding nature in products and software has pushed tech to incredible heights that few truly understand that extent and breadth of everything available.
The best part about microservices is that it make apps more reliable and scalable. They also allow for faster development and updates without any interruption. You probably didn’t realize this, but big companies like Uber, AWS and Amazon are constantly releasing features on a daily basis without you realizing it… all thanks to microservices that allow us to make this happen. Microservices ensure that whatever runs on one computer can run on another. This makes everything distributable, like a product embedded in the architecture.
Microservices are the unsung heroes of technology and ironically something that is often not taught in school (which it should be, by the way if you’re studying computer science, but … whatever. another topic). They’re making software more efficient, resilient, and adaptable. They’re not just for developers; they impact how we all experience technology. If you’re in tech and haven’t experimented a bit with microservices, you’re doing yourself a DIS-service 😌