Microservices and DevOps are two very different technologies. Both of them offer agility and operational efficiency. Moreover, these technologies are not limited just to the transformation of monolithic architecture into decomposed services. Enterprises like Netflix, Amazon, Etsy, etc. have leveraged these technologies to their full potential by optimizing their CI/CD pipeline. On one hand, microservices is responsible for rapid development of application features while on the other hand DevOps is responsible for managing and maintaining the functionality of the software. These technologies can work in conjunction with each other for many unsaid benefits. Few of them are mentioned below.
Agile team structure
DevOps has always been an integral part of microservices architecture. Unlike other architecture, microservices make it feasible for the DevOps team to develop independent functionality parallel to each other by following agile principles and subdividing the software into smaller modules. They achieve it by transforming the traditional horizontal team structure into cross-functional teams. Such teams are then made responsible for developing, maintaining, and deploying individual software functionalities.
Microservices fused with DevOps offer tons of business benefits such as -
- Better code quality
- Error reduction
- Software reusability
- Better product quality
Increasing delivery speed with DevOps culture
When microservices follow DevOps principles, they succeed in breaking down organizational silos to increase development capabilities and enhance cross-department collaboration. Adopting DevOps can help your organization with a cohesive strategy and efficient collaboration.
DocuSign is one such example. The company introduced e-signing technology using the Agile approach to software development. However, the lack of collaboration amongst different teams resulted in failures.
So, DocuSign adopted the DevOps culture to improve collaboration between operation and development team members. Despite the cultural shift in the organization due to DevOPs adoption, the CI/CD problem persisted. They used application mock for internal APIs to support continuous integration.
The application mock tool offers a mock endpoint and response. DocuSign combines it with incident management and tests the app before releasing it through simulations. It helped them quickly build, and test.
Offers flexibility
Packing up DevOps with microservices empowers them to address bug issues effectively. As using microservices means dealing with multiple independent modules, dealing with production bugs can be fixed immediately without having to worry about affecting other functionalities. The decoupled approach of microservices helps the DevOps team to simplify development and testing processes while allowing independent modification of software services.
Automation
Automating testing, packaging, and deployment tasks are some of the unsaid benefits of having a microservices architecture. Any issues faced by services in a DevOps pipeline in an automated task don’t impact other services. Due to the simplified codebase, packing microservices with DevOps also improves in making feedback loops shorter while addressing bugs.
Using microservices benefits vastly during deployment and maintenance stages. Once all the testing is done, the service is deployed as a container using an automated task. The process saves a lot of time managing dependencies and network configurations.
Containers
Another important feature of the microservices-based architecture is containerization. As mentioned in the previous section, containers pack each service as an image to help reduce complexity arising due to dependency duplication and configurations. Leveraging containerization streamlines your continuous delivery pipeline. Services packed within containers act as fully independent entities that make them completely reusable while interacting with other systems.
The service-based approach of microservices is well suited to work with DevOps. Microservices architecture enhances DevOps productivity by embracing common toolsets. Together both the technologies work seamlessly to increase productivity and quality of the software product while leveraging the architectural flexibility. Both the technologies are well-capable for building highly scalable cloud-native applications for fulfilling user demands. If you have any queries regarding the same, feel free to ask me in the comments below.
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