Exploring 5 real-world use cases of microservices

Short on time? Explore these key takeaways:

Businesses must move from legacy to modern platforms. To ensure a robust, modern IT infrastructure, microservices have been widely embraced as the preferred software development method in recent years. We’ll look at real-world use cases of how microservices are used and explore the benefits it offers, including:

• How the modular approach to software development allows for complex applications to be delivered quickly and reliably.
• How it is used to modernize and refactor legacy applications, improving productivity and scalability.
• It enables multi-group development and can be used in conjunction with the DevOps model to improve efficiency and collaboration.

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In recent years, microservices have been widely embraced as the preferred software development method because of the modular approach it enables. This approach allows complex applications to be delivered more rapidly and reliably than those built with monolithic architectures.

In the past, organizations deployed different teams to work independently on various services while creating an application that works as a collection of services. Now, applications can use an evolved technology stack to create a highly maintainable, testable and scalable application organized around business capabilities.

This article will examine real-world use cases and related case studies that demonstrate the advantages of microservices architectures.

Modernizing and refactoring legacy applications

To be able to quickly adapt to evolving technologies, businesses must move from legacy to modern platforms. Refactoring your IT infrastructure with microservices will ensure a strong and modern build that allows your team to deploy full-stack development technologies.

Application modernization significantly boosts productivity, as demonstrated by our case study with a leading U.S. financial services firm. By modernizing their monolithic architecture into microservices, we quadrupled their application performance related to horizontal scalability.

Big data applications

In many cases, microservices — coupled with event-driven architecture (EDA) — are a natural fit for complex applications and cloud environments. Microservices provide scalability and extensibility to the required application because of its loosely coupled architecture.

For example, Amazon used microservices to simplify its application deployment pipeline, uncover potential problem areas and rebuild a robust application framework while introducing a solid open-source system to cater to a vast volume of data processing. The service-oriented microservices architecture optimally supported every function across the globe.

eBay also benefited greatly from microservices architecture. Growing traffic was once overwhelming for eBay, and it was becoming difficult for the systems to handle the complexities of growth. To cater to 75 billion database calls in a day, eBay decided to divide the application, database and search engines by adopting microservices architecture. Since the technology was first introduced, constant and timely updates have kept the company website stable while boosting its time-to-market rate.

Real-time data processing 

The publish-subscribe messaging pattern used in microservices architecture enables seamless, asynchronous communication to process and analyze real-time data for streaming platforms to generate intelligent outputs.

It takes more than 500 microservices and APIs to deliver a product as refined as Netflix. As an early adopter of microservices, the company is a fascinating case study of its many benefits

Organizations that capture high-volume unstructured data, such as social media networks like Twitter, must simultaneously be scalable and flexible. Because they moved from a traditional web application to microservices, Twitter can now identify roadblocks and release faster deployments seamlessly.

Multi-group developments 

To meet frequent release timelines, the software development space is commonly built of multiple developers working on the same piece of an application’s feature. To cut down scenarios of the code succumbing on ‘merge day’, microservices architectures enable applications to be split into independent services that can be managed and plugged in by individual groups.

The DevOps model

DevOps and microservices work well together. Microservices improve the productivity of the DevOps team by embracing a common toolset that can be used for both development and operations. This enables common terminology and processes for project requirements, task dependencies and challenges. Developers and Ops teams can work jointly on a problem and successfully fix a build configuration or script.

Modern companies, such as Coca-Cola, decided to adopt microservices early. Its structure is divided into a single app that can address any speed or agility-related issue.

Microservices are a better way to build applications that are used across multiple channels, such as notification and login services or travel and hotel booking services like Airbnb. These successful use cases show that microservices architecture is an important and necessary part of business technology. Each company might need it for a different reason, but the results will always be the same – efficiency, growth, innovation and advancement.

We partner with organizations to determine the appropriate use case of microservices and help achieve breakthroughs faster. If you’re considering implementing microservices in your organization, let’s discuss how we can help.