How LEGOS-like software development using Microservices helped Toobler?

Microservices: Legos for Software Development

We are so much in love with colorful plastic bricks aka LEGOs! In an age of online games and internet-connected toys, the humble Lego brick has risen against all odds.With approximately 62 pieces of Lego bricks for every man, woman and child on the face of the earth, mere 6 or 8 bricks can be combined in more than 915 million ways. What is the relation between legos bricks, microservices and software development?

Counted among the most valuable toy brands in the world, Lego is not just another millennial fad but enjoys a huge fan base of children and adults alike. Countless benefits including improved motor skills, cognitive flexibility, spatial reasoning,engineering skills make it great for all ages and learning levels.

Software Development like LEGOs

After playing with Lego blocks for decades, one cannot help but wish to build applications by snapping together different components just like mixing and matching different plastic blocks to build a ship, car, high-rise building and what not. The flexible design capabilities of Legos paves way for incredible software development.

The only thing that limits you while playing with Legos is your own imagination. The tiny blocks, when put together in the right manner can help you build monster fighter planes to stunning replicas of monuments.

At Toobler, we thought, “Why not do the same thing with our software development”?

With the entry of Microservices in the tech industry, LEGOs-based Software Development became a reality.

What are Microservices?

Microservices are a software development technique—a variant of the service-oriented architecture (SOA) architectural style that structures an application as a collection of loosely coupled services.

Adopting Microservices as a Design Standard

With the increased adoption of microservices as a design standard, our organization reaped numerous benefits of modular design. It helped us easily maintain and scale software as per usage and changing needs.

The biggest advantage of breaking down an application into independent services is improved modularity. It makes understanding, developing and testing an application a lot easier. Individual teams can easily develop, scale, deploy,and redeploy independent services to build new applications.

Microservices: The LEGOs blocks for Software Development

To begin with, consider two scenarios:

1. Building a structure using LEGOs

2. Building a structure from scratch

Consider building a structure using Legos- with ready-to-use individual building blocks, the entire process is simplified as it helps you to build without much hassle. This is in stark contrast to building a structure from scratch wherein you would first need to build custom pieces and then assemble them into whatever you desire.

Just like Legos, Microservices are specialized building blocks with individual functionalities. The scalable blocks are typically combined via APIs and help break down huge enterprise solutions into smaller blocks that can be assembled as per your business requirement.

With changing consumer needs, it has become imperative for organizations to cater to their needs in a more agile and reliable manner. Conventional monolithic applications require extensive validation and testing even for small changes and an outage affects the entire application. This is where microservices architecture steps in to address the drawbacks.

Increased resilience

Leveraging microservices, an application is decentralized into separate entities. This ensures that even if one service crashes, the entire structure does not fail. Thus, enabling us to deploy business-critical services on multiple servers for increased availability and performance.

It helped us build, scale and innovate faster with increased business agility. With an aim to undergo digital transformation, Toobler rapidly adopted microservices to:

• Re-architect platforms

• Modernize legacy systems

• Discover new streams of revenue and growth

• Improved Scalability

• Faster time to market

• Easier debugging and maintenance

• Optimized resources

• Improved ROI

One of the greatest advantage that Toobler has observed while using microservices is that it facilitates frequent, rapid and reliable delivery of complex applications. Microservices has greatly helped us evolve our technology stack Neverthless, integration of microservices has never been a cake-walk for Toobler. In the process, we had to suffer many issues which further helped us strengthen our resilence.