10 Questions to Answer Before Designing and Implementing a Microservices Architecture for Platforms and Products

Software products and platforms have revolutionized several domains. As the software industry and with it the digital economy has matured, we are posed with new challenges of scaling and effectively maintaining software solutions and products that are growing bigger and more complex. Breaking them into simple services as per the principles of Microservices architecture is touted to be the most effective solution to managing products and platforms. The architecture makes products and platforms more scalable, reliable, and resilient.

But implementing microservices is not an easy task. Managing them requires careful planning and expertise. If not implemented with care, the product or platform may become unsafe, impossible to maintain, or just slow. Here are 10 questions product and platform innovators should ask themselves while designing, building, and maintaining solutions built using Microservices architecture.

1. Have you studied the domain thoroughly to implement a relevant microservices design? Services are basic components of a software solution built on Microservices architecture. They should align with business requirements. Hence, we must build even basic components like services only after studying the domain and the purpose of the solution.
2. Does your microservice perform a single task?Services are small, focused, and autonomous units with a defined responsibility. It is best to break down services into the simplest form in such a way that they perform a single responsibility and a specific task.
3. Does your service API Design offer flexibility and scalability?Services interact with each other through APIs. Your choice of API Design should be such that it makes the product or platform scalable and flexible.
4. Does your Data Management address issues like Data Synchronization with apt replication strategies?In a microservices architecture, each service has its data source. This requires saving the same or related data in multiple data sources. It is important to ensure that data is consistent across the data sources. The best practice is to have defined data synchronization, caching, and replication strategies.
5. Does your microservice architecture include monitoring and logging solutions?Since the architecture involves several services, they must be optimized to perform well. Monitoring and logging solutions provide the status (availability), performance, and errors in each service, optimizing each one of them and cumulatively the entire product or platform.
6. Is your security strategy robust enough to protect services from malicious attacks?Since Microservices involve many interactions and exposed APIs, they need to be implemented with caution. Hence, it requires a robust security strategy with measures like encryption, and authentication and authorization mechanisms.
7. Can you simplify your service interactions?Services interactions in a microservices architecture can be complex to design, implement, and orchestrate. It is important to assess services from time to time and remove redundant ones. Sometimes, services are consolidated to improve performance and reduce dependencies and complexity. Services must be as simple as possible and easily maintainable.
8. Do your APIs require rationalization and consolidation?With time, some APIs may become outdated or redundant. Removing unnecessary APIs and consolidating appropriate ones simplify interactions and reduce maintenance overhead.
9. Is your underlying infrastructure optimal?To improve the overall performance of products and platforms, the underlying infrastructure must be optimized to ensure that the load is balanced well. The infrastructure should also support automatic deployment and scaling up or down as per the demand.
10. Did you standardize the development and management of microservices?Microservices architecture makes it possible to build products and platforms by distributed Agile teams. Hence it is a good practice to define and document standardized development practices, service interactions, and management procedures. Clear documentation of the Service APIs is also critical to make sure that the product or platform is scalable and maintainable.

The best way to design and implement the most suitable Microservices Architecture

Though Microservices architecture makes software products and platforms scalable and more adaptable to the needs of users, implementing it can become quite cumbersome. A good option can be outsourcing to a reliable product or platform development partner. Such trustable collaborators should build it just as you would’ve built it yourself. Moreover, they can bring a new and much needed third-party perspective to design and development. This is especially useful when assessing security, compliance, and scalability. However, your collaborator should have the domain as well as technical knowledge and should be trustable and committed to transparency.

Are you looking for such meaningful collaborations? We’re here for you.