Cloud Microservice Platform: A Key for Digital Transformation

The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic has wrecked every industry, and markets are struggling to recover and get back on track even to this day, except the cloud microservice sector. Contrary to the prejudiced assumptions, Covid-19 has led to a significant lift in business architectures. Many organizations had to shift their cloud infrastructural strategies overnight, accelerating the overall migration to cloud platforms and declining the on-premises workload by the end of 2025.

According to studies, companies across the world have spent $34.6 billion on cloud services right from the outbreak of Coronavirus pandemic. The second quarter of 2021 has comparatively witnessed a spike of up to 11%, as stated by the Logic Monitor survey. Considering this mega shift to cloud microservices, Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, said that the world has seen a tremendous digital transformation of worth two years in just a few months.

The cloud microservice market might be a trending sector, but the preferred architecture also has some drawbacks. But before diving right into the disadvantages, let’s first understand the term “cloud microservice”, its demerits, deployment, and scope of the market.

What are Microservices?

Microservices are a way of breaking down large software into smaller, independent, and loosely coupled components called modules that communicate with each other through APIs. Microservices are just another approach to architectural solutions for designing complicated web-based applications. As an evolution from the traditional approach- Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), microservices are specifically developed to overcome the challenges of monolithic architectures.

The reason for microservices grabbing immense attention among developers is because of their dynamic and agile features in API management, besides faster execution of highly complex and discrete tasks. Moreover, with microservices, larger applications can stay unaffected in case of failure in a single module, thus, offering improved fault isolation. Besides, this approach effectively helps in faster deployments due to smaller codebases and scope.

Despite these advantages, cloud microservice platforms also have some challenges that businesses must know before switching.

Disadvantages of Cloud Microservices

1. Complex communication between services

Since every module is an independent service, it gets difficult and complex to handle requests between modules. Furthermore, developers might need to write extra codebases to keep disruption at bay.

2. More resources required

With multiple modules come multiple databases that might get tricky and exhausting to track. This requires more resources for easy index handling and transaction management.

3. Difficulty in global testing

Unlike the monolithic approach where testing the whole application was easier by just launching Web Application Resource (WAR), microservices pose a huge difficulty in testing. It is because every module needs to be tested separately before going on with the complete application, which is both time-consuming and cumbersome.

Deployment of Cloud Microservices

The ideal way to deploy cloud microservice applications is within containers or virtual operating system environments. These containers offer processes with isolation and access to all the dedicated hardware resources. Infrastructure providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) provide virtual machines that one can use for microservices deployment. However, lightweight microservices may not leverage a complete virtual machine, thus, affecting the cost-effectiveness.

Scope of Cloud Microservices Platform Market

As stated earlier, the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic has forced organizations to switch to remote working schedules which is significantly boosting the cloud microservices platform market growth. However, this might pose a challenge for small-scale businesses which can run smoothly with a monolithic application for simpler and faster executions. Large-scale organizations are ideal customers of the cloud microservices market, since they need to ensure uptime, which is not possible with monolithic-based applications.

About the Author(s)

Princy A. J

Princy holds a bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from the prestigious Tamil Nadu Dr. M.G.R. University at Chennai, India. After a successful academic record, she pursued her passion for writing. A thorough professional and enthusiastic writer, she enjoys writing on various categories and advancements in the global industries. She plays an instrumental role in writing about current updates, news, blogs, and trends.