Dmytro Lazarchuk is a co-founder and CEO of Relokia with over 8 years of experience in digital marketing and data migration services.
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Your business shouldn’t tie itself down with artificial boundaries, geographical barriers or software interdependencies. The world’s leading companies use a modular approach to grow, optimize costs and embrace the benefits of remote work. Today, we’ll try to find out how microservices and APIs can support your journey to become modular and reach greater heights.
Modular Organization As A Concept
Modularity is a system divided into smaller independent components. This concept is used in business models, design philosophies and software architectures.
When applied to organizations, modularity means breaking your company down into separate tightly knit units that each focus on a specific element of your business. For example, you can split your product or services into multiple self-contained modules and assign teams for each module. This could help you focus on your primary goals and outsource part of your operations to third-party contractors.
Take a company with a unique product but zero understanding of how to monetize it. If it were a modular company, it could hire a CFO or an agency to develop a business model and recruit clients. Likewise, global manufacturers that don’t want to spend a fortune on taxes and operating expenses partner with local companies to distribute their products in different countries.
Popular Companies That Adopted Modularity
If you look closely enough, you’ll see that many big companies have adopted a modular approach.
• Apple outsources manufacturing to over 30 countries, with China, India and Taiwan as dominant parts of its supply chain. They also work with other manufacturers, namely Qualcomm and Intel, to produce electronic components.
• Intel uses external foundries for specific products and has over 100,000 remote employees across the globe.
• Spotify uses microservices architecture for its digital music streaming service. This helps their engineers test and deploy application components without modifying the rest of the system.
The Spotify example shows how modularity applies to software architecture. Let’s focus on how you can use this approach for your IT.
What Are Microservices, And How Do They Transform Your IT?
Microservices is a software architecture that distributes your system into loosely coupled and highly cohesive modules. Each module has a specific function, runs its own processes and is independent of other components. Microservices use APIs to communicate and exchange data between applications.
Here’s an example to improve your understanding of APIs and microservices. Imagine a streaming platform with a media streamer, a customer portal and payment processing features. In a conventional monolithic architecture, every feature is part of the same codebase, so scaling or updating one component might require redeploying the entire app.
In a microservice architecture, these features are isolated yet loosely tied together using APIs that allow them to work together. Thanks to this, your teams can update or replace one module without breaking the whole system.
How Microservices And APIs Benefit Businesses
Let’s look at the advantages of moving from a monolith to loosely coupled services.
Fewer Constraints, More Flexibility
Loosely coupled architectures allow you to restructure your business units, much like a building made of Lego bricks. You can replace the blocks in your “building” without reconstructing the foundation. It takes much less effort to add, remove or switch component microservices and providers based on your needs than it does with a monolithic architecture.
Productive Environment
Microservices allow you to organize your business operations around multiple teams, each responsible for a specific function — so you don’t have to micromanage every process in your company. It also gives your employees the technological autonomy to choose tools, frameworks and types of APIs better suited for an individual service.
Business Scalability
Microservices allow you to scale servers, databases and computing resources and add new modules to meet growing demand. You can also update individual modules without modifying other parts of the system.
Reusable Components
Companies can reuse existing modules in another software instead of developing new functionality from scratch for every application. You can use APIs to implement out-of-the-box services from third-party providers. For instance, Google has an open API repository to help you implement its cloud services on your platform.
Time- And Cost-Efficiency
Strong boundaries and minimal dependencies mean that small changes in one module won’t affect your entire system. It saves time and money on coding, testing and implementing new features. Plus, the independent nature of your services means different teams can work on projects in parallel. This allows for outsourcing processes and tasks to third-party providers instead of in-house employees to reduce costs.
Now, let’s slow down. I don’t want you to think microservices are a panacea for every business. There are other, arguably better, ways to modularize their architecture.
Modular Monolith Versus Microservices: What’s Best For You?
Microservices come with a hefty overhead. They require you to allocate resources for each module, which could drive your costs through the roof. And the complexity of the architecture can make maintenance and debugging tricky.
SMBs, in particular, would benefit from a modular monolith. Similar to a microservices model, a modular monolith model divides your system into components with defined APIs. You still deploy all modules in the same codebase, so one component could affect the entire system. But the modules have strong boundaries that keep the dependencies minimal. And because everything takes place inside a monolith, you need fewer resources to maintain your IT.
A modular monolith can also transition nicely to microservices. First, you modularize your monolithic architecture by setting boundaries for your services. Then, as your demand and user base grow, you can split modules into microservices and connect them with APIs.
Should You Go For Microservices?
The modular approach is about breaking complex systems into smaller pieces to improve problem-solving. When done right, it makes companies more flexible, scalable, productive and cost-efficient.
Microservices and APIs can help you implement the modular concept for your software systems. But this process is a journey that happens over time. It’s best to start small, preferably with a modular monolith architecture. As your team gains experience, you will gradually transform your business into a modular one.
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