The microservices architecture solves a lot of problems for us, mostly because of the changes in the way in which we develop and deploy the microservices. Let's go through some of the advantages that the microservices architecture brings to our development process, as shown in the following list:

• Small teams: Since a particular microservice usually focuses on doing one thing and doing it well, the teams responsible for building that microservice can usually be small. A team can own multiple microservices end to end, where they are not only responsible for their development but also their deployment and management, giving rise to a good DevOps culture.
• Increased independence: In a microservices architecture, the team responsible for the development of one microservice does not need to have complete knowledge of how another microservice works internally. The teams only need to take care of the API endpoints that have been exposed by the microservice in order to interact with it. This avoids the dependence of teams on each other to carry out their development activities.
• Increased resilience to failures: In a microservices architecture, the failure resilience is quite high because of the fact that a malfunction in one microservice won't affect the whole application, and will rather provide a gradual degradation of the service. During this time, a new instance of the failing service might be launched, or the failing service can be easily isolated for debugging so as to reduce the impact.
• Increased scalability: The microservices architecture provides a lot of freedom in the scalability of the application. Now, as the load increases, the individual microservices can be scaled up independently instead of scaling the whole application up. This scaling can happen as horizontal scaling, where more instances of a select set of microservices can be launched depending upon the load being experienced by the application, or these services can be individually scaled up using vertical scaling, where more resources are dedicated to a particular service to allow for better handling of the increasing load.
• Easy integration: With microservices, the integration between the different services is easy, as no knowledge of the internals of the other microservices is required. All the integration happens while assuming the other microservices to be black boxes.
• Increased reusability: Once developed, a microservice can be utilized in different applications. For example, a microservice that's responsible for the handling of user authentication can be reused in multiple applications, which may require user authentication without the replication of the code.
• Freedom to roll out new features with ease: With the microservices architecture, new features can be rolled out easily. In most cases, a particular feature is converted into its own microservice, and the service is then deployed in production after proper testing. Once the service is live in production, its features are available for use. This differs from the monolithic approach, where the whole application needs to be redeployed when a new feature or improvement needs to be deployed to production environments.

From this list, we can see a number of benefits that the move toward a microservices architecture provides us with. From the choice of the tools to the ease in rolling out new features, the microservices architecture makes it lucrative for developers to hop into the wagon and quickly start rolling out new microservices.

But all of these advantages do not come for free. As much as there are advantages, there is also the possibility of creating a mess of the infrastructure while working on the microservices architecture, which may not only create increased costs. However, this may also impact the overall productivity of the team, which may end up more focused on firefighting the issues that may arise because of the flawed implementation of the architecture rather than focusing on the improvement and development of the features that may be essential to the users of the application.

This is nothing to worry about. We can follow a few simple pieces of advice that can help a lot during our journey with the microservices architecture. So, let's spend some time understanding these simple tips, which can go a long way in helping us make our microservices journey smooth.