How Moving to Microservices Will Increase Your Business Agility


AllCloud Blog:
Cloud Insights and Innovation

Moving to a microservice architecture is an innovative solution to quickly deliver software, while lowering risks. It is a top priority for many future-focused companies. When your business is ready to make the transition, it’s important to know exactly what its application needs are, to ensure you achieve the right quality of service, scalability, flexibility and business success when all is said and done.

Looking at the business benefits of microservices can help your enterprise to identify its unique goals for the move, and ensure you have the support in hand to manage the added complexity of moving to a containerized architecture.

Why Move to Microservices?

Any business knows that in the traditional monolithic way of building applications, the larger their applications are, the more difficult it is to deploy new features or make changes or improvements. This is the pain point behind the creation of microservices, and the containers in which they run.

With microservices, instead of everything being built into one piece, all your applications are broken down into the smallest possible parts. These are kept independently from one another, which means that each process, or microservice, can be built, tested, deployed or updated as a part of the whole, without disruption to the overall application.

The Business Benefits of Microservices

Working with companies to establish their roadmap and goals for the change to a containerized architecture, we have seen incredible growth and success from a best practice approach to the move. Some of the most common benefits for businesses are:

  • A Door to Business Agility

    Making changes to legacy applications has high risk attached, as changing one process could negatively affect another. In contrast, with loosely coupled microservices, updates can be performed independently of the rest of the application. This then leads to quicker application development and version rollouts, so that companies are able to ‘fail fast’ and stick to agile product timelines.

  • Ability to Enforce Security Best Practices

    In microservices, a full understanding and visibility of network dependencies is essential, as well as consistent access and security for each microservice. Utilize deep knowledge of container scanning and cluster networking, and apply service mesh to ensure your environment is using all possible tools to stay on top of security.

  • Scalability

    Microservices can be scaled horizontally, with two machines running alongside one another, rather than making the existing machine larger. This means you can scale up and down exactly when and how you need, saving money, and improving user experience.

  • Improved Application Performance

    If and when problems arise, one small piece of your application is affected rather than the whole thing. This provides better performance for end-users, and eliminates downtime while IT are troubleshooting and restoring service as usual.

  • Simplicity and Consistency

    Many businesses make the move to a containerized infrastructure because of the need to scale. When automated and templatized, microservices are easy to manage and simple to replicate or remove. This means you have a consistent approach to scaling, orchestrating and managing your application.

Will Microservices Save me Money?

We often get asked whether using containers will have a positive effect on a business’s bottom line. Like any IT environment, best practices are key. Many companies have jumped in head first to a microservices environment that they do not fully understand and therefore find impossible to manage effectively. If this is the case, then like any other environment, containers can be expensive and wasteful. However, if you take the time to architect, maintain and optimize your new environment with care, you’re likely to see a positive impact on your budget, as you lighten the load for your business and maximize the use of your resources.

Increasing Business Agility with Containers

One way to ensure you get the most out of microservices is to ensure you’re using industry-best technology to guide your move. We work with Kubernetes, a container orchestration tool that adds to the efficiency of running your microservices, and can help your containers and applications communicate in an automated and streamlined way. It adds simple portability to your applications, allowing you to move them to various cloud or internal environments. Kubernetes also encourages best-in-class security, providing a consistent approach to access and management, even across a hybrid environment.

Making the most out of containers and microservices comes with embracing an agile way of thinking. This includes adopting DevOps pipelines and embracing automation across your environment. For these goals, Kubernetes is a must-have. However, as an open-source technology that improves all the time, setting up and managing Kubernetes is a skill in and of itself.

Lucky for you, AllCloud have years of experience in how to get it right the first time.

EKS, Amazon’s managed Kubernetes service is just one of the tools that AllCloud uses when supporting businesses in their move to a containerized infrastructure, as well as KOPS, ECS and Fargate. We work with each client to understand their unique business goals and requirements, and turn that into  business and technical roadmap for approaching microservices. We then lean on our own tried and tested best practices, and the right technologies to achieve their specific enterprise goals.

Want to learn more about how we can manage your move to microservices?

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Tal Helfgott

Read more posts by Tal Helfgott