With digital evolution in mind, it seems somewhat paradoxical that monolithic architectures still often form the basis for applications and services today. Monoliths are thus important pillars of today’s business processes and at the same time prove to be an enormous obstacle to meeting tomorrow’s requirements.
Higher efficiency, more agility, flexibility and speed of action are the focus in the rapidly evolving corporate world. Monolithic architectures are less suitable for these requirements.
Microservices: Flexibility as part of the DNA
The principles of microservices as small-scale, independent services, each with a dedicated scope of functionality, bring clear advantages: each service can be deployed, implemented, upgraded, scaled or restarted individually – without having to roll out, stop and restart the whole thing again. In the course of continuous delivery requirements and the introduction of agile development methods, the approach of a microservice-based architecture is almost a must.
A microservice always focuses on a specific domain and incorporates exactly the data that is needed to process this functionality. Monolithic architectures, on the other hand, consist of several interdependent components and are therefore much more complex and have a more protracted integration process.
Microservices also offer a clear advantage when it comes to providing updates: thanks to a continuous delivery approach, they offer greater fail-safety because updates can be performed separately without affecting the other microservices. In monolithic architectures, updates are usually applied in fixed release cycles, which significantly reduces their adaptability.
Industry 4.0: Digital infrastructure without silos
Microservices are the exact opposite of traditional, monolithic software – making it virtually impossible to change from one day to the next. This makes it all the more important for companies to keep the advantages of microservices in mind. Especially for production companies that pursue a clear future proof digitisation strategy, software solutions with a microservice approach are important: because silo-like digitisation is not forward-looking. Neither in terms of the production processes to be digitised nor as an approach to the inner workings of the digital infrastructure.
Platform as a Service solutions offer production companies the opportunity for a unified approach to digitisation across the entire production. If the PaaS is based on a microservice architecture, the large production domain can be divided into many micro domains. Depending on the functional requirements of the company, microservices can be added or removed. So instead of installing large monolithic applications, the application installation adapts exactly to the needs of production.
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