Almost every tutorial and article you’ll see on microservices begins with a fancy graph or drawing that looks something like this:

Except, unless you already understand microservices, this drawing tells you nothing. It looks like the UI calls a “microservice”, which calls a database. Not particularly enlightening.

So let’s get down to the real question — why? Why would anyone do it like this? What’s the rationale? And since this is The Simplest Guide To Microservices, we’ll start by looking at this issue from the very basics.

What Happens If I Don’t Use Microservices?

Imagine you have an app, and this app has two main components to it: an online store, and a blog. This is without microservices, so they’ll be combined inside of one app. This is called a monolithic app. The store can’t exist without the app.

Suppose the store and the blog have nothing in common — that is, the store will never request any information from the blog, and the blog will never request any information from the store. They are completely separate, decoupled pieces.

Now, for simplicity sake, let’s assume the store and blog can both only support one customer at a time. What would happen if the blog now has three customers, while the store still only has one? We wouldn’t be able to support the three customers on our blog, so we’d have to scale our monolithic app. We can do this by creating two more instances of our app.

Now we’ve got three instances of our app! But take a moment to see if you notice the issue with scaling it this way.

The issue is the store! The only reason we needed to scale our app was because we couldn’t support enough customers for our blog, but what about our store? Clearly, we didn’t need two extra stores too.

In other words, we didn’t actually want to scale our entire app. We just wanted to scale the blog, but since the blog and store are inside of one app, the only way to scale the store is to scale the entire app.

This is the first issue with monolithic apps, but there are other issues too.

Since you now know the basic idea behind a monolithic app, let’s add some coupling into the mix to make this more realistic. Suppose, instead, the store actually makes calls to the blog in order to query for the blog’s merchandise. In other words, the store needs the blog to be working for it to display whatever merchandise we have up on our blog.

The key thing to note here is what happens when the blog component crashes or dies. Without the blog component, the store doesn’t work, because it can’t fetch the list of merchandise without the blog.

Notice that this happens, even when we scale the app, meaning the entire app instances becomes useless.

This is another issue with monolithic apps, which is that they are not especially fault tolerant. If a major component crashes, all components that rely on it will also crash (unless you restart the component, or have some other way to restore functionality). Even in the case of restarting components, we really do not want to restart the store component if the blog component fails, because the blog is what caused the crash, not the store.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just point the store component to a different blog component if the one that it’s currently using fails?

As you’re probably noticing, you can’t have two blog instances in one app as per our design constraints, so this isn’t possible with our monolithic app approach (note that you could still technically do this in a monolithic app, but it’d be very cumbersome and would still have scaling issues). Microservices to the rescue!

Enter Microservices

A microservice architecture is essentially the opposite of a monolithic architecture. Instead of one app, containing all of the components, you simply separate out all of the components into their own apps.

Monolithic apps are basically just one giant app with many components. A microservice is just a tiny app that usually only contains one component.

We’ve added in the UI and the DB (database) parts into this diagram as well, to slowly increase the complexity of the architecture. Notice that because each microservice is an actual app, it needs to be able to exist on its own. This means that we can’t share one giant database connection pool like you can in a monolithic app. Each microservice should be able to establish its own connections to the database.

However, microservices still depend on each other. In this case, our store microservice needs to contact the blog microservice to get a list of merchandise. But since these are technically two separate apps, how do they communicate? The answer is HTTP requests!

If the store wants to fetch data from the blog, the only way to do it is through a RESTful API. Since the store and blog are separate in a microservice architecture, you cannot directly call the blog anymore as you could in a monolithic architecture.

Another crucial thing to note is that the store doesn’t really care who is on the other side of that GET request, so long as it gets a response. So this means we can actually add in a middleman on that GET request. This “middleman”, which is basically just a load balancer, will forward that GET request to a live blog, and then pass back the response.

So notice that it no longer matters if any individual blog instance dies. No store instance will die just because a blog died, because the two are completely decoupled by a RESTful API. If one blog dies, the load balancer will just give you a different, live instance!

And notice, too, that you don’t need to have an equal number of store and blog components like you do in a monolithic architecture. If you need 5000 blog instances, and 300 store instances, that’s completely okay. The two are separate apps, so you can scale them independent of each other!

Conclusion

We’ve taken a look at both monolithic and microservice architectures. In monolithic architectures, the only way to scale your app is to take the entire thing, with all of its components, and duplicate it. This is inefficient because you often only want to scale a specific component, and not the entire app.

Additionally, when you use a monolithic architecture, a single failure or crash can propogate throughout the entire app, causing massive failures. Since it is harder to implement redundancy (multiple copies of the same component) in a monolithic app, this is not a particularly easy problem to solve.

Microservices can also have a single point of failure as well, but because microservices are smaller, quicker to startup, and easier to scale, you can often create enough redundancy, or restore dead instances in time, to prevent catastrophic failures.

To make a microservice architecture work, it’s crucial that each microservice represents a single component. For example, the authentication for an app should be a microservice, the online store UI should be a microservice, and the financial transaction mechanism should be a separate microservice. The three of these together can make up an online store, but all three of them must have the ability to exist on their own.

Remember that the microservice architecture is not a silver bullet. It has its own disadvantages as well. For example, if your app has no need to scale (like if it only has a handful of users), then a microservice architecture is way overkill.

With that being said, I hope you’ve gained some insight on how microservices work, and how it compares to a monolithic approach.

Happy coding!