Traditional business has moved to uncharted online territories in the wake of the pandemic to grow while constantly improving customer experience. Now brands across the world are hoping to benefit from this new e-wave. Through this worldwide pivot, customer gateways have expanded and become more direct to meet the needs and goals of businesses everywhere.
Every medium-sized and small business is intensifying its efforts to disrupt industries to build an online brand in today’s fierce global market competition and to advance in the new direct-to-customer business model (D2C) era.
According to research, over 70% of businesses are moving to e-commerce, 45% of small and medium-sized businesses need websites, and 71% of companies are attempting to keep up with customers’ increasing expectations. On the plus side, post-pandemic, 41% of companies focus on preserving and enhancing their online presence across all channels.
As the need for innovation increases, Microservice Architecture and Serverless Architecture are taking center stage. But is it all hype? Old wine in a new bottle? In this blog, we provide exclusive details of Microservices and Serverless Architectural principles, along with some success stories, so that you can decide if you should switch from a Monolithic codebase to a modern approach to application development.
Microservices Architecture – Customer Landscape
Any business, regardless of size, can gain from microservices because they offer a valuable way to increase the technology’s scalability and agility. Businesses can pragmatically improve customer experiences by utilizing the microservices approach.
As a result of the business’s adoption of the microservices architecture strategy, features of higher quality that satisfy the supply and demand of the business needs are delivered more quickly. Microservices can be scaled automatically to accommodate the growing volume of transactions–thus ensuring a seamless customer experience
In a microservice architecture, the software can be adjusted at run time and deployed independently, allowing it to scale at a price that is most favorable to the customer.
Millennials Vs. Gen Z
The new disruptive economic forces driving the annual purchasing power are the young millennials and Gen Z. Because of their respective customers’ strong purchasing power and enduring brand loyalty, they have both opened the door to enormous commercial opportunities.
Millennials’ and Gen Z’s attitudes toward spending and technology vastly differ. The Gen Z generation is more accustomed to iPad, Wi-Fi, and smartphones than the Millennial generation, which grew up with enormous personal computers, DVD players, dial-up internet, and small-screen mobile phones. Gen Z is more concerned with financial planning and high-quality items than millennials are, who prefer to spend their money on more things that improve their lives.
How Modern Architecture Enables Innovation
Every economic sector is drastically changing and adapting to thrive in the fierce competition. Let’s get a bird’s eye view of the advantages of adopting a modern architectural plan.
Microservices allow programming languages more freedom in terms of application design. This solution enables developers to use a range of programming languages.
As a result, the risk of change is reduced, and technology doesn’t get stuck in one place. The system is designed to increase the reusability of small business services across industries and enable them to be shared across organizations. Examples of microservices include payment and login systems.
From a customer-centric standpoint, microservice architecture can not only deliver functionality, content, products, and services swiftly, but it can also supply all that and more while minimizing disruptions to the customer experience.
With the help of the enhanced traceability that comes with Microservices, one can track customer usage patterns and deliver a more personalized experience across different channels.
What are Microservice-based Applications?
A “microservice” is a small, autonomous service that connects via well-defined APIs and is an organizational method for software development. The services in the collection are primarily loosely coupled, highly maintainable, and testable and are deployed and owned independently by a small team.
Microservices motivate an organization to update its IT infrastructure and add new components aligned with its business goals and values.
Besides REST APIs, the most used language-independent interfaces, there are many other forms of communication. Containers are used to deploy microservices when they’re ready for deployment.
Microservices vs. Monolithic Architecture:
Microservices combine a single application from several smaller, loosely coupled services, in contrast to monolithic architecture, which consists of a single, significant, tightly coupled software. Unlike monolithic designs, which focus on or run as a single service, microservices-based applications are independent components that function as complete services.
Although the microservices’ lightweight API enables efficient communication between services, the more complex code base makes adding or enhancing new functionality relatively tricky. Under the monolithic architecture design, there was no concept of “self-healing.”
Every microservice-based design must have components or services that handle inquiries, requests, and metadata.
Microservices Principles for App development
Here are some recommendations for developing microservice-based apps. Let’s examine each principle’s specifics.
● Autonomy Principles for Microservices : Microservices are distinct and genuine because of their independence. They are simple to scale and manage because of the strength of authentication. If the business goal is sustained, the performance of the services and the level of customer satisfaction will improve when the degree of autonomy is maintained.
● Design for Failure Principle for Microservices : The framework behind the microservice application enables it to continue to function even if any of its components fail. The services are set up correctly to minimize the impact on their own SLA and lower the likelihood of a complete shutdown or failure. Even when one service is down, it cannot affect the other service line. The principle relies on circuit breaker patterns to stop communication between two or more services.
● Loose Coupling Principle for Microservices : The power of loose coupling reduces and organizes the gap between customer needs and offerings. The move does not impact the customers because they are not dependent on one another. It reduces coordination costs and promotes faster growth in customer needs and corporate goals due to the rapid improvement in efficiency and agility
● Business Capability Principle for Microservices : The operation of microservice architecture is based on cross-functional teams. This is the center of the organization’s objectives and top priorities. Each product is run and managed by a team for the rest of its life. Each team understands every aspect of the service application in use.
Serverless Architecture
Serverless architecture is building and releasing apps without taking care of the fundamental infrastructure. A third-party agency oversees managing the infrastructure and server. The application’s front end needs to be taken care of, as everything in serverless architecture is driven by external management.
The third-party vendor oversees all management aspects, including security, monitoring, testing, maintenance, and coding. Function as a Service (FaaS), which lets developers define application code as a collection of discrete operations, is one of the most well-liked serverless designs.
Significance of Serverless Architecture in App Development
Let’s look at the benefits of serverless architecture adoption and why it should be the best option for your next application.
The company only pays for the computing and storage capacity used in serverless systems, not for the period granted. As a result, the business’s expenses get reduced.
- Through the serverless architecture, any individual working in the back end can log in and monitor the platform seamlessly.
- A serverless and container infrastructure layer is abstracted from the infrastructure layer. Here, the most crucial consideration is the product’s quality.
- The core concept of serverless architecture’s characteristic flexibility and lightweight application structure makes it possible for it to be frequently updated while focusing on the cost to the quality.
Use Cases of Serverless Architecture
Here are some examples of how we can use serverless architecture effectively with FaaS and APIs.
UPS (A case for a serverless strategy) UPS chose cloud-based infrastructure, which provided the company with an improved chatbot. With the assistance of Microsoft Azure as an AI tool, UPS can now meet customer needs with increased transparency and visibility.
T-Mobile Their serverless architecture relies on AWS Lambda for mobile and app modernization. Coding was at the core of development to protect sensitive data and data migration, documentation, and API integration.
Coca-Cola Through API gateways and serverless technology, Coca-Cola vending machines underwent a dramatic transformation worldwide. They initiated a lambda function on Amazon Web Services to complete the change. AWS Lambda handles all the transaction’s underpinning business logic. Another excellent aspect of their serverless approach is that the payment gateway only operates when they receive a genuine request. Less than one second is needed for the entire exchange of information.
Netflix Netflix employs AWS Firebase, which divides the video into small 5-minute sections coded according to Netflix specifications. The final segment of the video is aggregated and deployed using serverless events and rules.
Conclusion:
Leadership is not solely about being “understanding” and “nice” but more about tapping into individual motivations to enhance their capabilities. Effective tech leadership ensures employees’ long-term development to create a continuous learning culture. This, in turn, translates into higher commitment, the eagerness to experiment with new ideas, and brings innovation to the table.
After all, a tech leader must ensure the organization’s sustainability alongside several goals like – innovation, environmental sustainability, stakeholder profitability, well-being, and most importantly, drive growth and cutting-edge technology.
About Techwave:
Techwave has recently completed over 30 Enterprise App Modernization and Development initiatives by migrating workloads from On-Prem Monolithic architecture to Cloud-Native Microservice and Serverless Architectures. Our customers have experienced improved operational efficiency, application reliability, and cost optimization. If you are currently evaluating App Development or App Modernization initiatives, choose Techwave to boost software innovation, transform your product growth strategy, and accelerate revenue growth.