This is When Your Start-up Should Opt for Microservices to Develop Applications Microservices as a paradigm is becoming popular with e-commerce and financial services companies

When your product gets really popular, you experience a sudden burst of users. In a situation such as this, microservices, an advanced distributed architecture helps you handle the load and enables you to scale very quickly.

Microservices as a paradigm is gaining popularity in e-commerce and financial services organizations. But with all that hype around it, is Microservices your fit?

In a conversation with Entrepreneur India, Aashish Gupta, Research Analyst – Application Architecture Infrastructure and Integration, Gartner shares his expertise on when and why businesses should adopt microservices-based models.

What are Microservices?

Large applications are difficult to change and scale, whereas smaller components make the task much simpler. This is when microservices architecture comes in handy.

In Gupta's words, microservices architecture means you are breaking down your big monolithic applications into very small, loosely coupled components.

"When you have loosely coupled components, applications are easy to change and scale. For an organization that is looking to deploy very fast or makes changes to the system very quickly, should be opting for microservices," Gupta shares while giving examples of companies like Uber or Amazon or Netflix that have the ability to make several hundred changes every day.

How Open Source Complements Microservices?

When you opt for microservices, you also need a lot of application infrastructure support wherein you need tools to manage communication between services and do all the monitoring, logging, auditing and service discovery.

Gupta said, "Earlier, a lot of this tooling was built on open source technologies. Many companies leveraged these open source tools and integrated them together to create their own microservices infrastructure. But this is changing with established cloud vendors supporting these features natively on their platform."

Which Sector Can Benefit From the Architecture?

According to Gupta, online retail companies or e-commerce platforms are adopting this architecture heavily as they have a huge user base.

The second most popular admirer of microservices is the BFSI sector. The industry is sitting on a lot of legacy applications and modern banking requires them to support digital business technologies like mobility and IoT. "This kind of a model requires systems to have a service-oriented design," he adds.

Additionally, the analyst is also getting inquiries from the government organizations because of the focus on enabling citizens through digital business technologies and supporting their e-services like bill payment and customer grievance apps.

Gartner also gets inquiries from companies operating in sectors like healthcare, food and beverages, and travel.

Tips For Entrepreneurs Looking to Integrate Microservices

For entrepreneurs and chief technology officers that are planning to adopt this model, the expert has the following tips:

# It's not about technology. It is about people and processes.

If concepts like agile and DevOps are unfamiliar to you and if you don't embrace automation CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery)even a good design like microservices cannot help you.

#When you are moving towards this kind of highly distributed architecture, you are not eliminating the complexity.

It is just that the complexity that was inside the monolithic application is now moving out of it and getting distributed between the services.

A lot of effort goes into managing the moving parts in a microservices architecture. So, you have to change the team structure which is a big undertaking. Until and unless you have the buy of the management, you cannot go about it.

#Don't go for it just because there is so much hype around it and people are talking about it.

Take a pragmatic approach. See if hyper agility or scalability is actually a requirement for you. If not, adopt a more lenient paradigm like mini services, which doesn't require services to have fine grain responsibilities and own a data store. Alternatively, you could go for rapid application development tools or high productivity platforms for simpler use cases..