Brands who want to create and update omnichannel commerce experiences at the speed their customers demand can no longer leverage monolithic platforms. Microservice-based architecture provides an alternative to these traditional, rigid platforms.
What are Microservices?
Microservices are an architectural and organizational approach to software development. When leveraging this approach, teams create software by combining multiple individual microservices. Microservices themselves are de-coupled services that are developed and deployed independently. They communicate via APIs and each have their own data source. Generally, microservices are organized around business capabilities.
A single microservice can be its own packaged business capability or, several microservices can be combined to create one packaged business capability.
Learn more about microservices and packaged business capabilities:
Benefits of Microservices for Your Technical Team
Ensuring that your commerce solution is built with modern architecture is extremely important for IT teams who need to quickly deliver on business team requirements. Microservices architecture provides IT teams with the necessary technical agility to bring their commerce initiatives to the next level:
Elastic Path makes it easy for your dev team to customize by extending microservices to meet your requirements from complex products to unique checkout flows.
Elastic Path provides an extensive toolset for integrating microservices with the existing applications, including clean and intuitive northbound APIs and flexible event-driven integrations.
The independent nature of microservices allows Elastic Path Commerce Cloud to maximize the up-time and makes it easy to isolate faults within the application ecosystem.
Benefits of Microservices for the Business Teams
While business teams won’t be working directly with microservices-based architecture, the speed and control that microservices provide can be hugely impactful on rate of innovative and business agility:
With microservices your dev team can more nimbly build, launch, and optimize the experiences you need to keep customers delighted and outpace the competition.
With Elastic Path, the service is called automatically vertically and horizontally to handle peak load and long-term business growth. This allows you to deliver superior customer experience while optimizing infrastructure costs.
You have the ability to pick and choose microservices a la carte to create the right solution for your business by combining Elastic Path and 3rd party services.
Is Microservices Architecture Right For Your Business?
While a great fit for many businesses, a microservices architecture may not be a fit for your unique needs.
Microservices Will be a Good Fit for You if:
- Your customer needs and business priorities change quickly so you need to be able to make changes in days, not months.
- You want to build a “best-for-me" commerce solution where you can easily integrate with your existing applications.
- You may have unique or complex products, sales process, or checkout that requires a fair amount of customization.
- You have an in-house technical team or plan to use an SI for your implementation. This is important since microservices are more technical to build with. However, at Elastic Path not all of our customers have a high digitally mature but they all leverage microservices. Brands who have a medium or low digital maturity can work with a partner to complete their implementation, eliminating the need for an in-house technical team.
Microservices May Not be a Good Fit for You if:
- Your digital commerce experience(s) stay relatively static and you do not find yourself wishing to update them regularly. You are able to keep up with customers demands using a non-microservices architecture.
- You’d prefer if your commerce solution was all from a single vendor, also known as an “Out-of-the-Box" solution, to reduce managing multiple vendors.
- Your products are relatively simple and you do not need to customize checkouts or sales processes.
- You do not have an in-house technical team and do not plan to bring on an SI to support your implementation. Or, in some cases you may have a relatively junior or small tech team who does not have the bandwidth to work with a microservices solution.
Continue Learning About Microservices
Learn more about the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to implementing eCommerce microservices.
In Elastic Path Commerce Cloud, microservices can be easily customized with Commerce Extenders to meet your business needs.
It can be challenging to explain the benefit of microservices to your entire team. Read this blog to understand the key benefits your organization & consumers will see.