Unlocking the Power of Hybrid Microservices Architecture

Introduction

Since the world has taken an accelerated digital path, the evolution and revolution in the digital landscape has truly changed the way modern world software applications are built, deployed and managed. One of the architectural pattern that is increasingly becoming popular in the recent past is microservices architecture. Microservices offer benefits such as improved scalability, enhanced agility, effective maintainability, powerful resiliency and much more. Microservices architecture has played a pivotal role in the way modern day software applications are developed, managed, deployed, scaled, secured, monitored and so on in comparison to the conventional monolith architecture.

Microservices Architecture : Understanding the Basics  

What are microservices? Let's understand about it in very simple words. Microservices architecture is a methodology or approach or an architectural style of developing software applications that divides a large and complex application into smaller, loosely coupled independent services, wherein, each of the services are responsible for the specific business domain related functionality. It would be really interesting to know how microservices are changing the world in comparison to monoliths. Although, microservices architecture is gaining a lot of traction, however, monolith architecture is still there and there may be organizations still using it. And, there are ample reasons behind it.

It's a tough choice for organizations, businesses, architects and developers to decide whether to go for microservices architecture or still continue with monolith architecture. A proper thoughtful assessment does help in such scenario that weighs the benefits and advantages of microservices over monolith and enable team to find out whether choosing the microservices architecture would help them achieve their business goals or not.

Microservices architecture is well suited for the large complex software applications. Whereas, if the application itself is not that too complex, monolith may be a good option. Have discussed here the top 3 reasons when microservices may be a bad idea. Hence, a more thoughtful and pragmatic approach needs to be taken based on the scenario on hand and then decide, whether to go with monolith or to go with microservice or to go with hybrid microservices approach.

Let's now take a look at what is hybrid microservices approach, what are the benefits it may provide and when should one plan to chose the hybrid microservice approach.

What is Hybrid Microservice Architecture?

Yeah, you may have guessed it right. As the name suggests Hybrid, it is mainly about the combination of both the worlds of microservices architecture and the monolith architecture. To make it simple, what it really means is that, in the software application, some components would be following microservices architectural pattern and some components would be following monolith approach. This hybrid approach enables a flexibility about an incremental or gradual transition from monolithic to microservices architecture. Thus, this approach enables organizations to reap the benefits of the advantages of both the architectures. At the same time, going with hybrid architecture also helps to minimize or lower the risk of a complete failure of the microservice architecture adoption.

Advantages of Hybrid Microservices Architecture

The main goal of hybrid microservices architecture is the reap the benefits of both the worlds of microservices and monolith. One advantage it provides is, you need not to refactor your existing monolith application completely. Instead, in this hybrid microservices architecture, it can very well co-exist with the microservices in the application. It offers an advantage of gradually transition from monolith to microservices in a longer run considering other aspect of the business, teams, budget and so on. As stated previously, It also helps to minimize the overall risk of a total failure of microservice, instead if a microservice fails for some reason, monolith component can still handle and fulfill the request. Hence, overall hybrid microservice architecture provides flexibility in terms of gradually transition from monolith to microservices architecture in entirety.

Implementing a Hybrid Microservices Architecture

In my viewpoint, here is the overall approach that should help to get started with implementing the hybrid microservices architecture for a software application.

• Plan and design for hybrid microservices architecure well in advance. Try to break down the monolith system into logical components. Also, identify the common components that can be used across. 
• Identify which components can be started early for implementing as independent services and which component can remain monoliths. Some of the factors to be considered while doing so would be to think about for which components you need more scalability, agility and so on.
• Evaluate the business benefits of adopting hybrid microservices architecture approach.
• Start with the implementation of hybrid microservices architecture.

Conclusion

Microservices are surely a present as well as future for implementing large complex applications effectively as per the various benefits the microservices architecture offers. However, when moving from monolith to microservices architecture, it may not be possible to do it in a one go itself. It indeed is a huge challenge to do so even if one attempts for it. Instead, hybrid microservices architecture enables to evaluate microservice architecture and allows not to use it because everyone else uses it, instead use it only when the application really needs it to meet the business goals. Thus hybrid microservices architecture helps to leverage on best of both the worlds of microservices as well as the monoliths. Hope you would have found this post useful. Do let me know your thoughts or feedback at techfundas.in@gmail.com. Thank you.