The world of software development has been through many winds of change, but few have been as pervasive in the last couple of years as the shift from monolithic architectures to microservices. This evolution has dramatically affected both DevOps tools and practices and, therefore, changed how software is built, deployed, and maintained. In this article you learn the evolution of DevOps from monolithic to microservices
The Monolithic Era: One Single, Compact Block
At the beginning of the history of software development, monolithic architectures predominated. These were systems assembled by interwoven parts and functions to provide an integral whole or perfect match. Although this type of development had its favorable aspects—easy to deploy because of its single-block nature and also because there is only one code base—the disadvantages then could be un-pre-emptive in every large aspect:
- Challenges in Scalability: Most of the time, scaling a monolithic application meant scaling an entire system when actually only one part needed additional resources.
- Risk in Deployment: Changing one part of an application would often affect the whole system and increase chances of system unavailability or failure.
- Slow Development Cycles: For development teams, this single codebase made the adaptation of new technologies or practices a rather slow process.
As the projects of software development started to become large and complex, these limits turned out to be more apparent, which required the need for flexible and scalable solutions.
The Rise of Microservices: Breaking Down the Block
A whole new paradigm of breaking down applications into smaller, independently deployable pieces of services. Each of these microservices handles a certain functionality and speaks to the other services using APIs. This is one shift that has dramatically changed how DevOps does business with respect to tooling and practices. Let’s see how this evolution has affected various facets of DevOps.
Containerization and Orchestration
For this reason, with microservices, managing each service and deploying it efficiently required special attention. This is where containerization technologies like Docker come in. These allow developers to package applications and their dependencies into isolated containers. Containers offer a consistent environment across development, testing, and production; therefore, the management of microservices became much easier.
- Docker: It has become one of the cornerstones in modern DevOps and makes creating and managing containerized applications much easier.
- Kubernetes: With the increased usage of microservices, Kubernetes became the standard for container orchestration. Kubernetes allows automatic deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications, thereby making the management of complex microservice architectures much easier.
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)
This shift toward microservices has influenced how CI/CD pipelines are thought about and implemented. Often, CI/CD pipelines built and deployed a whole application in the case of monolithic systems. Microservices support the individual development, testing, and deployment of their services, which naturally brings even more granular and effective continuous integration and delivery.
- Microservices CI/CD Pipelines: Modern CI/CD tooling that is designed to support teams that build and deploy many microservices independently. Doing this greatly enables teams to deploy more frequently with a lot more confidence in the releases.
- Features Flags control the release of new features and changes when deploying multiple microservices.
Monitoring and Observability
With microservices, the new challenges arise in relation to monitoring and observability because all of the services are distributed. Unlike with monolithic applications, where monitoring was going to be rather straightforward, microservices require a more sophisticated approach so that observation of performance and health can be done at multiple service levels.
- Distributed Tracing: The Jaeger and Zipkin toolsets allow teams to realize distributed tracing, thus enabling them to track requests moving through different microservices and find out bottlenecks or issues.
- Centralized Logging: On platforms such as ELK Stack, which was built on Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana, or Fluentd, logs from various microservices are collected onto a single platform-a centralized logging system-for easier analysis and troubleshooting.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Infrastructure as Code has become increasingly important with the rise of microservices. IaC provides consistency and reproducibility of environments by allowing teams to define infrastructure through code.
- Terraform: This is also a very popular IaC tool that also provides provisioning in cloud infrastructure and services for the very demanding need in these complex environments by microservices.
- AWS CloudFormation: For teams on AWS, CloudFormation is a way to describe and provision AWS infrastructure via templates.
The Modern DevOps Toolchain: Integration with Microservices
DevOps tools definitely keep on evolving with increasing demands to support dynamic and distributed nature of microservices. Most advanced DevOps toolchains integrate multiple tools and practices that address challenges presented by microservices:
DevOps Platforms
Examples of such offerings are Azure DevOps and GitLab, focused on providing an integrated experience right from CI/CD to source control to project management. These platforms also support the complexity of microservices-including, for example, pipeline orchestration, automated testing, and deployment.
Service Meshes
Application traffic management, such as load balancing, service discovery, and security, is managed by the Istio service mesh or Linkerd-between the microservices. Service meshes abstract out the pain of operating microservice interactions and ensure predictable communication among services.
Cloud-Native Ecosystems
The cloud-native ecosystems, such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and other major cloud providers, are furnishing tools and services specifically directed towards microservices architecture. Such ecosystems allow the deployment of microservices to be scalable and resilient by proposing managed services for databases, messaging, and more.
The shift of DevOps tools from monolithic to microservices is the sea change in how software will be developed, deployed, and managed. The move to microservices brought along new tools and practices to deal with the complexity of distributed systems, containerization, continuous integration/continuous deployment, monitoring, and Infrastructure as Code. As more organizations begin to adopt microservices, the DevOps toolchain will evolve even more with increasingly sophisticated solutions to support modern software development.
The journey from monolithic architectures through microservices not only changed the way DevOps is done but also brought in more agile, scalable, and resilient software systems. Teams could master all evolving tools and thereby go through the modern complexities of software development much better to deliver quality applications.
