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Using Azure for Microservices

Building and managing applications or software can often be complex. But it doesn’t have to be. Adopting a microservices approach to your application development can improve the way you build, secure and sell your app – allowing you to deploy new features and react to any issues effectively. According to a report from Nginx, 36% of enterprise businesses are already using Microservices within their business, and an additional 26% are researching. It’s safe to say Microservices are quickly being adopted by businesses of all shapes and sizes since the approach was first launched in 2011.

Firstly, what is Microservices?

Microsoft describes Microservices as an architectural approach to building applications where each core function, or service, is built and deployed independently. Microservice architecture is distributed and loosely coupled, so one component’s failure won’t break the whole app. Independent components work together and communicate with well-defined API contracts. In short, Microservices allows your developers to experiment by rolling out an isolated new feature and simplify the debugging and maintenance process.

Enabling you to fail faster (and smarter) and increase the overall productivity of your development team.

Benefits of Microservices

There are many benefits of using Microservices to build applications. Here are six key benefits identified by Microsoft:

  • Agility – Microservices enable you to update a feature without the need of redeploying an entire application. This is because Microservices are deployed independently of each other.
  • Small, focused teams – Microservices will be small enough so that a small team will be able to build, test and deploy it efficiently. Having small, focused teams will increase agility compared to larger widespread teams.
  • Mix of technologies – your teams will be able to easily pick up new technologies that best suit their software or application.
  • Fault isolation – if you are ever faced with an individual microservice becoming unavailable, it won’t disrupt the rest of your application or software as it operates independently. Assuming that your Microservice has been designed to handle any faults correctly.
  • Scalability – you’ll have the flexibility to scale Microservices without having to scale the entire application or software. Allowing you to effectively utilise your resources.
  • Data isolation – you’ll be able to easily perform schema updates as only a single microservice will be updated rather than an entire application or piece of software.

How Microservices works with DevOps

Microservices can often be complex due to the range of moving parts involved, which is why it’s important to adopt DevOps alongside Microservices to help with deployment, monitoring and lifecycle automation.

DevOps brings together siloed jobs such as IT operations, development teams, quality assurance and security to create a more fluid way of working that encourages collaboration. Which allows you to produce better applications or software by having all those roles working towards a common goal.

Microservices is often described as optimised for DevOps and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD), this is because they are smaller services that can be deployed more frequently. Deploying Microservices will help you successfully adopt DevOps – why? Because Microservices architecture requires DevOps to run effectively.

Adopting Microservices

If you’re looking to build resilient, scalable and distributed applications, Microsoft Cloud can help you deploy Microservices. Here are four benefits of adopting Microservices with Microsoft Azure:

Build and deploy services with agility

Building your Microservices in Azure will enable you to easily manage any new features, updates and bug fixes within an individual component without having to re-deploy the entire application. Meaning your development team will be able to save time deploying features and focus on innovating your application. You’ll also be able to automate any software delivery workflows with a continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline such as GitHub Actions.

Scale your Microservices with demand

Hosting your application in Azure will provide your developers with the ability to scale individual Microservices and subsystems based on your specific resource needs without having to scale the entire application. You’ll have the ability to pack a higher density of services into a single host by leveraging container orchestrator through tools such as Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

Create resilient applications

Microservices enable you to create resilient applications by using patterns such as circuit breaking to help tolerate individual service failure. This will also allow you to replace or retire individual services without affecting the entire application. Microsoft have tools available to help make this easier for you by installing a service mesh using the Service Mesh Interface (SMI) for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) or Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh for Azure Red Hat OpenShift.

Find the perfect approach for your team

Within Microsoft Azure you’ll have the ability to find the best approach for your team, allowing them to excel at what they do best. You’ll have the freedom to choose your team’s preferred deployment approach, language, microservices platform and programming model for each service.

Tools available and how they can help impact Microservices

Microsoft have ensured they have a range of tools available for you to leverage within Azure to help successfully deploy microservices.

  • Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS)
  • Azure Red Hat OpenShift
  • Azure functions
  • Azure container apps
  • Azure cosmos DB
  • Azure container registry
  • Azure API management

You can learn more about these tools on Microsoft’s website.

Are you looking to adopt Microservices?

The benefits of adopting microservices are clear. So, if you’re looking to deploy microservices across your business, look no further. We’re a Microsoft DevOps, Application Development and Application Integration partner. In other words, there’s no better partner to have on your side.

Ready to find out how you can start adopting microservices within your business? Simply get in touch to speak to an expert.