Over the past few years, we have witnessed that the use of Microservices as a means of driving agile best practices and accelerating software delivery, has become more and more commonplace. In an effort to avoid the pitfalls that come with monolithic applications, Microservices aim to break your architecture into loosely-coupled components (or, services) that are easier to update independently, improve, scale and manage.

Key Features of Microservices Architecture

  • You are able to change, upgrade, and replace each and every component individually without the functionality of other components getting affected.
  • It is autonomous in nature. Sharing any of the component code or implementation with other components is absolutely not required.
  • Microservices architecture follows the decentralized data management. Each service is known to have its own view on data models.
  • It’s doesn’t follow the “one size fits all” approach. All the teams enjoy the freedom to choose the platform best suited for their specific problems.
  • Individual components of Microservices are designed as a ‘black box’ which means they hide the details of their complexity from other components.

Microservices Architecture on AWS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is considered to be one of the best choices for deploying a Microservice-based application primarily because of the variety of IaaS, PaaS, SaaS solutions, and SDK packages offered by the cloud platform. AWS helps you in providing a vast array of building blocks which is needed to support software of any complexity and scale. Some of the key AWS tools and components which are used to build Microservices-based architecture include:

  • Computing power – AWS EC2 Elastic Container Service and AWS Lambda Serverless Computing.
  • Storage – Secure Storage (Amazon S3) and Amazon ElastiCache.
  • Databases – Amazon RDB, Amazon Aurora, Amazon DynamoDB and dozens more.
  • Networking – Amazon Service Discovery and AWS App Mesh, AWS Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon API Gateway and AWS Route 53 for DNS.
  • Messaging – Amazon SQS for message queuing and SNS for publishing and notifications.
  • Monitoring – AWS Cloudtrail for API monitoring and Amazon CloudWatch for infrastructure monitoring.
  • DevOps and CI/CD – Amazon Container Image Repository (Amazon ECR) and other DevOps tools for enabling CI/CD workflows.

You can configure the architecture you need and select any required operating system, programming language, framework, database, or other required services. This remarkable feature facilitates migration for the existing applications and enables you to quickly build new applications from scratch.

With AWS, you can expect to obtain a ton of managed building blocks for handling every aspect of Microservices implementation. It provides all the tools needed to replace these components with open-source alternatives if you possess the necessary expertise at hand and are able to manage your infrastructure, with a team to maximize the cost-efficiency of operations.

How AWS Helps in Addressing Some of the Challenges of Microservices Architecture

  • Provisioning of Resources and Effective Scaling: On-demand resources are readily available and provisioned when needed. Multiple environments can co-exist correspondingly. You are not required to employ cumbersome forecasting methods in order to know the storage capacity of the Microservices.
  • You Pay for What you Use: In AWS Microservice architecture, you can potentially experiment with the new features or services, and roll them out if they aren’t suited. This helps you find the innovation that best suits your business goals and also, fulfills a Microservice’s goal of achieving high agility.
  • Versatile Programmability Feature: AWS Microservices are characterized by a specific API, Command Line Interface (CLI) and SDKs for specific and different programming languages. Even complete architectures can be cloned, scaled and monitored through custom codes and programming languages. Moreover, in case of any failure, they are capable in healing themselves automatically.
  • Flexibility: The flexible environment provided by AWS Microservices enables you to programmatically build custom tools and deploy the suitable resources, thereby reducing the operational costs and efforts.
  • Infrastructure as a Code: You are able to describe the whole infrastructure as a code and it allows you to manage it in a version-control environment. You can re-deploy any specific version of an infrastructure at any time, and compare the quality and performance to any application version to ensure they are in sync.
  • Continuous Deployment and Delivery Enable Reduction in Operational Complexity: You may have a threat if you are managing multiple application cycles in parallel which can lead to operational complexity. AWS Microservices offer automation of the provisioning and deployment process, enabling the adoption of continuous integration. This ‘continuous integration’ can be further extended to the operations part of the life-cycle.
  • Managed Services with AWS: Cloud infrastructure relieves you of the hassles of provisioning virtual servers, installing and configuring the software, and dealing with scaling and reliable backups. Monitoring, scaling and security are already built into the AWS Microservices and they help you to further reduce the operational complexity of running microservice based architectures.
  • Rendering a Service-oriented Approach: Each AWS Microservice focuses on solving a specific and well-defined problem by communicating with other services by using clearly defined APIs. This approach helps you to breakdown the complex infrastructure into simpler bricks or modules and prevents the need of duplication of the processes.

AWS Microservices Architecture Use Case

Building a Subscription Renewal Platform On AWS Microservices Architecture for a leading provider of subscription, billing and CRM platform based in the United Kingdom

The client wanted to provide a consistently positive customer experience through improved interactions, guided by data-led insights at every stage of the customer journey.  They wanted a robust platform to support their next generation of growth and provide a superior level of service and experience to their customers.

The product engineering team at Aspire Systems, created the Java Spring Boot Microservices enabled subscription renewal platform for the client’s users in the pay per view model. The team developed the Microservices and API integrations along with the development of a Master Data Management (MDM) system. The MDM system was built on Amazon DynamoDB. The Microservices API is integrated and deployed on Amazon EC2 instances. To ensure the quality of Microservice-driven application, testing support was also being provided.

The solution provided the client with faster time-to-market, easy and seamless integration with third-party systems and an effortless subscriber management system.

Delivering Excellence with Microservices on AWS

As it is an established fact that Microservices definitely helps to break down the complex business process into simpler modules, AWS cloud Microservices adds to the benefits as they further reduce the operational and interactional complexity of the Microservices, helping you to define and use the most appropriate solution for your specific business problem. When you opt for AWS Microservices-based architecture, to streamline your application development processes, you can drastically improve your other business optimization initiatives along the way like DevOps and Agile practices.

 

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