Building Modern Applications with Microservices: Part 1

Jason Ma
May 6, 2016 | Updated: January 20, 2017
#Technical

This is the first in a two post series about microservices. This post discusses the background behind microservices, new technologies that have enabled them, and the benefit of microservices.

Introduction

As enterprises work to replicate the development agility of internet companies and innovate in highly competitive markets, application development has grown increasingly complex. The large, monolithic codebases that traditionally power enterprise applications make it difficult to quickly launch new services. Siloed and potentially distributed development and operations teams present organizational alignment problems. On top of this, users are more demanding than ever – enterprises need to scale effectively and monitor deployments to ensure customers are provided with high performance and a consistent experience. Of course, all this needs to be done while providing always-on service availability.

Due to these trends, there is demand for a software architecture pattern that can handle the requirements of the modern age. Monolithic architectures have been the traditional approach, but limitations with scaling, difficulties in maintaining a large codebase, high risk upgrades, and large upfront setup costs have compelled enterprises to explore different approaches.

In the last few years, microservices have come to the forefront of the conversation. They have been rapidly adopted, due to their ability to provide modularity, scalability, high availability, as well as facilitate organizational alignment.

The Monolith

Before microservices, a common approach to application design was to use a monolithic architecture. In this mode of development, the application is developed, tested, packaged, and deployed as a single unit. Codebases are compiled together, and the application is deployed as one entity. Scaling required copying instances of the application binaries and the required libraries to different servers, and the application code typically ran as a single process. Continuous delivery — an approach that involves fast, iterative software development and safe updates to the deployed application — was challenging since the full monolithic application stack needed to be recompiled, relinked, and tested for even the smallest incremental release.

What are Microservices?

Microservices is a software architecture where applications are broken down into small autonomous services. Services are typically focused on a specific, discrete objective or function and decoupled along business boundaries. Separating services by business boundaries allows teams to focus on the right goals and also ensures autonomy between services. Each service is developed, tested, and deployed independently, and services are usually separated as independent processes that communicate over a network via agreed APIs, although in some cases that network may be local to the machine.

Microservices grew from Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), which gained popularity in the early 2000s and emerged as a way to combat large monolithic applications. Key differences between SOA and microservices are:

  • SOAs are stateful, while microservices are stateless
  • SOAs tend to use a enterprise service bus for communication, while microservices use a less elaborate and simple messaging system
  • SOAs may have hundreds or thousands of lines of code, while microservices could have less than one hundred lines
  • SOAs put a greater emphasis on reusability (i.e. runtime code, databases), whereas microservices focus on decoupling as much as possible
  • A systematic change in a SOA requires modifying the monolith, whereas a systematic change in a microservice is to create a new service
  • SOAs use traditional relational databases more often, while microservices gravitate more towards modern, non-relational databases. Further sections will cover the advantages of non-relational databases over relational databases in a microservices architecture

Many architects found that SOAs suffered problems with communication protocols and lacked sufficient guidelines on effectively separating services, which laid the foundation for microservices to emerge as a best practice method to implement a truly SOA.

New Technologies Enable Microservices

The downsides of deploying and provisioning hundreds and potentially thousands of services did not outweigh the benefits gained with a microservices architecture (faster development, scalability).

The emergence of technologies such as containers (Docker, LXC) and orchestration frameworks (Kubernetes, Mesos) mitigate many of the problems that prevented using microservices architectures in the past.

Containers are lightweight run-time environments that provide isolation and scalability with minimal impact to performance and capacity. Packaging is simplified as the same environment can simultaneously host development, support, test, and production versions of the application, so that going from dev to test to QA to production is easier. Containers work very well in a microservices environment as they isolate services to an individual container. Updating a service becomes a simple process to automate and manage, and changing one service will not impact other services, provided that APIs are maintained.

Figure 1: Container in microservices

When organizations start running containers at scale, many look to orchestration frameworks to help manage the increased complexity. Orchestration frameworks help deploy and manage containers: provision hosts, instantiate containers, handle failures, and provide automated scaling. Kubernetes and Mesos are popular orchestration frameworks that make it easier to deploy containers at massive scale in a microservice environment.

To learn more about building microservices architectures with containers and MongoDB, download our guide: Enabling Microservices: Containers and Orchestration Explained

Benefits of Microservices

Many organizations can better meet the needs of modern application development by implementing microservices. The benefits include:

Faster Time To Market: In a monolithic application, any small change in the application will require redeploying the entire application stack, which carries higher risk and complexity. This results in longer release cycles, as changes may be batched together and not released until reaching a minimum threshold. With microservices, a small change to a service can be committed, tested, and deployed immediately since changes are isolated from the rest of the system.

Continuous integration — a software practice of integrating and testing developer changes to the main code branch multiple times a day — is much simpler and faster as there are fewer functions to test. This results in a more iterative release cadence as less code needs to be compiled and retested. Orchestration tools such as Kubernetes facilitate faster time to market by automating the on-line, rolling upgrade of containers, and providing the ability to roll back any changes should they be necessary.

Flexibility and Scalability: Monolithic applications require all components of the system to scale together. If one service requires extra performance, the only option is to scale all the services rather than the individual service that needs additional capacity. With microservices, only the services that require extra performance need to be scaled. Scaling is achieved by deploying more containers, enabling more effective capacity planning, less software licensing costs, and lower TCO as the service and hardware can be matched more appropriately.

Figure 2: Scaling containers

Resiliency: A major issue with monolithic applications is that if a service fails, the whole application may be compromised. In microservices, service boundaries serve as natural isolation barriers to prevent cascading failures from bringing down the whole system. If using containers, orchestration frameworks can provide added resiliency: when one container fails, a new one is started, restoring full redundancy and capacity.

Alignment With Organization: Microservices enable better alignment of the architecture to the organization, as team sizes can be optimally defined to match the required tasks. Teams can be broken down into smaller groups and focus on a single component of the application. This is especially useful for distributed teams. For example, if a team in Singapore handles three services, while a team in San Francisco handles five services, each team can release and deploy features and functionalities independently. This helps break down silos between teams and fosters better collab oration as cross discipline teams (Ops, Dev, QA) collectively own the services. This also ensures that the communication between teams matches the communication through the services' APIs. Essentially, the APIs between services define a contract between development teams on what each service should provide to others.

Reduction in Cost: By using containers, applications and environments (design, test, production, support) can better share the same infrastructure, resulting in increased hardware utilization and reduced costs due to administrative simplification. In addition, microservices also help reduce technical debt. With a monolithic application, there are costs (time, resources) associated with refactoring code for a large application. By breaking the application into API accessible microservices, code refactoring can be done service by service, resulting in less time maintaining and updating code.

In the second part of this blog post series, we will discuss how MongoDB enables microservices.

Learn more about MongoDB and microservices. Read the white paper.

Microservices: The Evolution of Building Modern Applications

About the Author - Jason Ma

Jason is a Principal Product Marketing Manager based in Palo Alto, and has extensive experience in technology hardware and software. He previously worked for SanDisk in Corporate Strategy doing M&A and investments, and as a Product Manager on the Infiniflash All-Flash JBOF. Before SanDisk, he worked as a HW engineer at Intel and Boeing. Jason has a BSEE from UC San Diego, MSEE from the University of Southern California, and an MBA from UC Berkeley.

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One Domain for GIANT Ideas: An Update to MongoDB Web Properties for an Improved User Experience

Today we are consolidating our two main web domains - mongodb.com and mongodb.org - into a single domain in order to enhance our user experience. Our two domains serve millions of unique visitors per month. However, we found having two domains created a counter-intuitive user experience for visitors. Community members and customers often ask why we had two domains for the same company and solutions. Users who naturally came to one site would be unaware that the other existed. In addition, our rich content, which lived across domains, often ended up competing in SEO, making it difficult for our visitors to find what they were looking for. As we added new web properties, like Cloud Manager, WiredTiger and MongoDB University, it became more challenging for us to create an integrated experience for our visitors and customers across the two domains. Merging the domains is a natural evolution. We think this change will create a more intuitive navigation and browsing experience for our community and our customers. We hope to solidify a consistent introduction to MongoDB for all visitors, whether they are a developer looking to download for the first time, a database admin looking to maintain their mission critical app in production, or a CIO looking to innovate and cut costs by researching database solutions. By simplifying the discovery of content for those browsing the site, we think our users will accelerate their ideas and companies. MongoDB.com will be the launchpad for GIANT ideas. We believe this new approach provides a more modern, consistent and intuitive web experience. If you have feedback on our website, please feel free to post in the comments of this blog. About the Author - Meagen Eisenberg Meagen Eisenberg is CMO of MongoDB. She brings more than 20 years of experience in the high-tech industry to her role at MongoDB. She has been recognized as one of the Top 50 most retweeted by mid-sized marketers according to AdWeek and one of the Top 25 B2B Marketing Influencers according to InsideView. In 2014, she won the Marketers that Matter award. Additionally, she won the SuperNova Award in Matrix Commerce from Constellation Research in 2012 and the Marketing Visionary Markie award within the marketing automation field in 2011. Meagen advises for several tech startups and before joining MongoDB, she was the Vice President of Customer Marketing and Demand Generation at DocuSign. She also held previous positions with ArcSight, an HP Company, TRIRIGA (acquired by IBM), Postini (acquired by Google) and IBM. Meagen has an MBA with a focus on marketing and strategy from Yale School of Management and holds a B.S. in MIS with a minor in CSC from California Polytechnic University at San Luis Obispo.

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Building a Culture of Growth: SVP Simon Eid on MongoDB's Massive Opportunity in APAC

Simon Eid is Senior Vice President Asia-Pacific (APAC) at MongoDB and leads the sales teams across Australia and New Zealand, India, ASEAN, and Japan. Simon's go-to-market organisation in APAC is growing rapidly and has nearly tripled in size in the past three years. They are hiring in all regions . In this article, Simon discusses MongoDB’s opportunity in APAC and how he builds a culture of growth and accountability. Simon Eid, SVP APAC, MongoDB (left) and Anoop Dhankar, RVP ANZ, MongoDB (right) MongoDB's opportunity in Asia-Pacific Out of the top 13 economies by GDP in the world , five of them are located in APAC: China, Japan, Australia, India, and South Korea. And that's to say nothing of the ASEAN countries which alone have more than 650 million inhabitants. Combine this with the worldwide database market, one of the largest markets in the software industry. IDC estimates that it will grow to $137B in 2027, and MongoDB has just reached $1B in ARR. This gives you a sense of the massive market opportunity we have globally. Regardless of industry, product, or service, almost every company is becoming a technology company, which means that every company is becoming a data company. We believe MongoDB is the Developer Data Platform that is best placed to support and accelerate that trend. We’ve already captured thousands of customers around the globe, but it’s important to keep in mind that our world is still in the early stages of shifting to the cloud and changing how applications are built and run. Compared to other software, what's special about the market we play in is that the database is not a “nice-to-have”; it’s mission-critical for organisations. As our world continues to undergo this digital transformation, we have the opportunity to transform how our customers use software and data to innovate, create, and disrupt industries. For example, look at Cathay Pacific , Hong Kong's home airline carrier operating in more than 60 destinations worldwide. The company's digital team turned to MongoDB on their journey to become one of the first airlines to create a truly paperless flight deck. Flight Folder, their application built on MongoDB, consolidates dozens of different information sources into one place. Since the Flight Folder launch, Cathay Pacific has completed more than 340,000 flights with full digital integration in the flight deck. Their innovation is enabled by MongoDB. Building a team across regions and cultures Our team in APAC is unique because of the different markets and cultures within the region. What this means is that we go to market differently in India than we do in Australia, in Singapore than we do in South Korea, and so on. Each market is completely different, but within all of them, there is a huge opportunity. Different from many of our peers, in APAC we've established business leaders who run regionalized teams in India, ASEAN, and ANZ with all functions reporting to them. These teams essentially operate as their own business and implement local best practices into their strategy. But, it doesn’t mean they’re operating in a silo. At the leadership level, there is an immense amount of collaboration and sharing of experiences to identify what’s working and what isn’t within each region. We also have a fantastic global sales organisation that rolls out extensive training and best practices to help enable our local teams to best help our customers and grow the business. Members of our APAC team at a recent offsite in Phuket Culture The most important thing is culture. We have a very high standard around everything we do and how we interact with each other. We don’t entertain politics. You can teach someone new skills and coach them on how to be successful in a new role, but if they’re not aligned with the culture, they will not be a fit. It’s a non-negotiable for me and why the most important aspect of the hiring process is the cultural aspect. If you get the culture right, everything else starts to fall into place. What I hear at MongoDB and from the teams I've built at other companies is that this is the kind of culture they can really thrive and grow. At MongoDB, our culture is defined and shaped by six core values . One of the values that’s most important to my team is “Embrace the Power of Differences”. Within APAC, there are a variety of cultural identities and nuances that can often be difficult to navigate, whether it is cultural values, beliefs, or go-to-market strategy. It’s important that everyone who joins my team is respectful of each other’s regional culture. What we’ve done within the APAC region, and with teams across the globe, is take everyone on a journey to understand and embrace these cultural differences. Our role as leaders is to develop our teams, from the bottom all the way up, which is part of MongoDB’s BDR to CRO career development initiative. We need to develop the next wave of leaders so that they’re prepared to step up when the time comes. For APAC, this means that regardless of where someone is from, each team member has been coached and developed on the cultural nuances so that they can lead people and go to market in each of the different regions. It’s also important that each team member contributes to a culture of psychological safety. Being part of a high-growth tech company requires taking risks and making mistakes. We have a high standard and we hold each other accountable, but it never comes at the cost of creating an environment where people are afraid to fail. When someone faces setbacks, I encourage them to share those experiences so that we can collectively learn. Through mutual support, we foster a stronger team capable of delivering exceptional results. The future of MongoDB in Asia-Pacific For any organisation to be successful, I believe it’s critically important for the entire ecosystem to act as one. As I mentioned earlier, at MongoDB the whole country ecosystem is aligned around one set of goals, so it's not a case of different teams running off in different directions. The teams are willing to lean in and do what's required to help each other build a great business. I can confidently say that in APAC, we are one team. This means sales, marketing, customer success, solutions consulting, and professional services all working together to focus on three things: making customers successful, building technical champions, and driving new workloads. As we continue to grow our team and MongoDB’s footprint in the region, these are the three things that will drive our success. As I mentioned earlier, there's a huge opportunity for MongoDB in APAC. Despite hiring slowing down or stopping completely at many other organisations, we're continuing to invest heavily in the region. To give you a sense of that - we've nearly tripled the size of our APAC go-to-market team in the past three years, and we've got more open roles across the different functions and regions. If you want to be part of this journey, there are three things I want to reiterate: First, we are extremely passionate about our culture, from the field level up to the leadership level. As a team, this is the brand we bring to the market. Second, the opportunity here is massive based on the total addressable market and our current share. And third, we place critical importance on development. By joining this team, I can promise that you’ll be provided with countless opportunities to develop your career and make an impact. I’m confident in my team and the leadership we have in place who are ready to take MongoDB APAC to the next level. Join us !

September 28, 2023