In the past decade, successful enterprises have transformed their application development ecosystem into a flexible and highly adaptable entity that can accommodate market demands seamlessly and fast. A great deal of this flexibility became possible thanks to the adoption of microservices-oriented development architecture for enterprise applications.
While the concept of microservices doesn’t need an explanation today, most enterprise leaders are now facing a new form of challenge with this development paradigm. They are finding it hard to manage the complexities involved in managing and scaling their microservices-oriented applications.
However, enterprises can make significant strides in their attempts to manage and scale microservices if they deploy the right strategies for the same. To that end, let us explore five tips for enterprises to handle a smooth scaling of their microservices-oriented applications:
Create Production Development Units (PDU)
A PDU is simply a team that owns a specific category or set of microservices. The ownership structure allows a smaller yet dedicated team to work towards successful deployment, management, and scaling initiatives of different microservices. More profoundly, it:
- Simplifies decision-making.
- Allows for better team collaboration and knowledge sharing.
- Fosters a culture where focused teams have expert working or operational knowledge of specific parts of a large microservices-oriented application.
It’s noteworthy that the presence of multiple PDUs may occur as a hindrance to collaboration during cross-cutting changes. However, this can be easily solved by leveraging one member of a PDU as a dedicated point of contact (POC) for communications surrounding a change. This person can liaise with communication POCs of other PDUs to effectively coordinate complex cross-cutting changes between multiple microservices.
Encourage Autonomous Ownership
We have already seen how aligning to a PDU structure benefits an enterprise in handling its microservices-oriented applications. Going a step further, it is crucial to establish clear objectives and privileges of team ownership for each set of microservices.
People building the software need to shift their focus from traditional modes of development-only philosophies to a more comprehensive mode wherein they build, test, deploy and run the application. Or, in other words, a mode where they exhibit control over the entire lifecycle of the microservices they work on.
Another critical measure to be taken in this regard is that when teams are given responsibility for the microservices as part of their ownership objectives, they must also be given the privilege to make decisions on important changes or initiatives that impact the microservices they own. This will foster both accountability and a sense of opportunity to own the growth or scaling roadmap of a microservice.
Establish a Data Governance Model
It is extremely important to provide a high degree of isolation for data that is to be consumed by each microservice. While scaling, if there is no clear demarcation of who owns what data, then it could lead to serious data integrity problems due to the collision of data sets.
Ensuring that each service has a clear and transparent data interface that no other service can access is important to establish concurrency among services as the application scales up over time. If bad data is generated owing to poor data isolation, it can:
- Impact decision-making capabilities and results.
- Slow down scalability initiatives.
- Lead to inconsistent customer experiences.
Enable Visibility into All Areas
When enterprises set out to scale their microservices-architecture-enabled applications, there are a lot of areas that the teams behind each service need to constantly monitor. Having the right dashboards with insights on each metric that DevOps must focus on is a key element of success.
Hence, enterprises must invest in the right tools that can be integrated deep into the operational landscape of microservices. These tools must be able to pull out data and portray the same in meaningful dashboards to enable seamless visibility. These dashboards can help provide a granular view for teams into what is working well and what needs more attention. Once visibility is established, scaling becomes easier as problems can be identified and resolved easily without disrupting the application.
Leverage Containerization
Packaging all necessary resources that a service needs to run makes it easier to achieve the above-mentioned goals of isolation, data management, and visibility. By using containers, either with servers or serverless, enterprises can better control and expand their digital ecosystem with minimal overhead.
Using an orchestration solution, container workloads can be distributed across servers with the seamless implementation of security and other vital necessities for the smooth operation of digital services.
In a Nutshell
Achieving success in scaling a microservices-oriented digital ecosystem is not a herculean endeavor. Enterprises need access to the right knowledge, tools, and guidance in making the switch from a traditional monolithic architecture to a microservices-oriented one. This is where an expert technology partner like zCon can help make a huge difference.
Get in touch with us to explore ways to effortlessly scale your microservices deployment without risks.
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