Organizations need to rise above designing a microservices architecture from a purely technical point of view to account for design considerations that cater to business functions.When business requirements are divided into correct Microservices, you can achieve in separation of services among teams that cause the least amount of interdependencies both during development/deployment and ongoing maintenance.
Although independent components and containers can be impactful, they can potentially affect running services if not divided correctly. This can slow down the pace of development. Microservices can also impose an overhead on the Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) processes, as well as operations. At DigitalOnUS, we are aware of the pitfalls, challenges, and the use cases that Microservices can solve, and our expertise enables us to provide the best solutions to address and fix specific problems.
Divide the work and make it easier to scale individual pieces of the system. Plan upfront for the much easier and cost effective horizontal scaling as against loading more memory and CPU to a single instance. Effective state management by pushing state to well defined and isolated parts of the architecture makes it possible to scale system horizontally.
We also evaluate the need for consistency in all services like security and monitoring. It is important that cross functional libraries and services provide the necessary guardrails to keep everything in sync.
Our migration is step by step, part by part, especially in mission critical services when downtime is simply not allowed. This prevents the type of “big-bang” migrations where companies could spend weeks troubleshooting issues in production of a recently migrated system. Combining a solid migration path with advanced deployment techniques like canary deployments, the blast of radius of something going wrong is minimized and rollbacks are easy to apply if they are needed.
Docker containers enable repeatable infrastructure that minimizes the ‘it-works-on-my-machine’ syndrome. Since Kubernetes is slowly becoming the de-facto standard for container orchestration it’s even more important to know what can be done with it and what cannot. The operational cost of running Kubernetes is non negligible, so we need to make the most of it and align to its design principles instead of duplicating costly functionality and getting in the way.
Kubernetes can be great for running containers in production, but what about day to day development in an engineer’s laptop? We can leverage tools from docker compose to lightweight Kubernetes implementations like K3S, or a mix between locally running services and remotely running ones in a specialized development cluster, all according to the needs of the system and availability of budget and resources.
We solve the ancient requirement of running the same services in different environments by leveraging tools like Helm or Kustomize, achieve immutable infrastructure by strict versioning of objects like ConfigMaps and Secrets, and keep everything secure with Service Accounts.
Do you want to auto scale a service according to complex logic other than CPU and memory usage? We can build custom metrics to use by Kubernetes auto scalers.
Do you need to bundle a set of related microservices as a single deployment unit? Kubernetes operators come to the rescue to coordinate the deployment and operation of the bundle.
Serverless can be a powerful tool to achieve rapid and lightweight development of new features. By taking advantage of the cloud provider’s existing infrastructure and processes, a lot of time is saved by not worrying about how to make deployments or how to design infrastructure. You simply write the code, upload it, and the provider takes care of provisioning, monitoring, availability, scalability, and operations. Since this comes at the cost of vendor lock-in, we use serverless when it makes sense to achieve results according to the business roadmap and needs. Did a feature grow too big to be kept serverless? Do you want to port it to another cloud provider? We establish boundaries since the beginning to isolate interaction with cloud provider specific technologies, so that we minimize the cost of a migration.
How often do you release to production? Big players are able to do releases several times a day. With the support of our Microservices architecture, multiple teams accelerate parallel development and learning processes for the creation of applications. This ensures Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery, completing the Agile Software Development cycle. It is a no-brainer that parallel execution of tasks increases velocity. The modular nature of the architecture ensures that even a new team member can easily set up the local environment for a single or a few Microservices, and leverage the existing common development environment for the rest of the services. In the growth track of a complex system, there comes a time where it is just not scalable so that a single team owns all the services or a part of every service. It becomes more important to assemble small interdisciplinary and autonomous teams that are able to release to production independently of each other. A robust Microservices and Container Architecture setup takes away the dependency on the time-consuming Quality Assurance and Change Management processes. This is the advantage of DigitalOnUs services.
Companies are more enabled today to pay only for the resources they use, by leveraging their infrastructural needs to various cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure. This has paved the way for a highly competitive market where even small players can rival big ones without the need to spend an initial fortune on on-premise data centers. Our experts are able to design and develop Cloud First applications that are optimized to take advantage of the features provided by cloud providers. Our expertise also helps you handle the subtle pitfalls and challenges that the cloud native model may present. Want to avoid vendor lock-in or support multiple clouds? Our architecting systems with layers of abstractions on top of cloud providers have got you covered. Some examples include developing with Spring Cloud (from Netflix stack) or deploying to Kubernetes container orchestrator.
We have helped multiple startups, digital agencies, enterprises (big or small) and software product development companies to streamline their outsourcing experience without any hassle.