Don’t underestimate the ‘micro’ in microservices

You may have heard us call APIs our favorite data-sharing doohickeys. They’re just that important for the state of cloud app development.

When your team connects different business functions together through APIs, you're tapping into the advantages of modernized data-sharing. Let’s say you suddenly need to pivot after receiving some unexpected news and time is of the essence. We know — real rare of a scenario. But the faster you pivot, the better. Well, now it’s no sweat. Because data from across the whole organization, from dispatch to production, delivery to quality control, is all connected and in plain sight, making quick and accurate decision-making that much simpler. 

But it’s behind the curtain where this game-changing data exchange is made possible. And it’s because of microservices architecture.

As an approach to design and deploy an application’s many components or services independently, leveraging microservices architecture allows APIs to work their modular magic. We like to think of the approach as the path to business continuity.

Let’s break it down. All of the components that make up a cloud application — logins, payments, messaging services, etc. — are able to scale separately on demand. This is a major difference compared to traditional monolithic architecture. To scale a monolithic application, IT staff have to deploy a new copy of the entire application. With a microservices application, only the necessary components are needed to scale, which is faster and far less resource intensive. Meanwhile, the same goes for fault tolerance, as a single service failure should not interrupt an entire application.

What does this mean for your business? 

Understanding an application’s design architecture can ultimately provide a sense of where the heavy building materials industry is heading with cloud technology.  

Scalability.

Harnessing the scalability of microservices translates to smarter resource usage and continuous operability. So, when a surge of order inquiries make their way to your plant, or when dispatch needs to get ahold of their drivers, an entire app can balance the traffic without locking up. 

Automation. Quite a bit of it.

A single application running on a microservices architecture is comprised of numerous components. In fact, there are so many that deploying them all manually would be an endless task. Automation is also used to detect when a service crashes or becomes unresponsive so it can automatically restart. From a behind-the-scenes perspective, automation frameworks used to build and test services can also be used in deploying them. For software users, this means faster updates and fine-tuned troubleshooting.

Decentralized culture.

Instead of development teams splitting off into sub-teams, microservices architecture encourages cross-functionality and collaboration. Technology providers who leverage microservices may have a fuller picture of specific needs within the heavy building materials industry.

Looking for an example?

Applications operating from within Command Cloud, which manage all business processes, from inventory management to back office, are scalable, resilient, and resource-efficient.  The microservices architecture at the bedrock of these applications is powering a modernized revolution across the concrete, aggregate, and asphalt sectors.