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[00:00:09] Lee: So microservices at its heart is effectively using the right tool for the job.
[00:00:14] It's breaking down. your bigger monolithic systems into bite size, small, services, And it makes them a lot easier to manage individually.
[00:00:26] You can have a single person or a single team that is solely responsible for one service, and that means they can focus. It gives them that focus.
[00:00:36] It gives them a better knowledge of what they're doing in that service because people come in and out of a team, they will quickly get up to speed when it's just one thing they've got to worry about.
[00:00:49] And even if you've got a multidiscipline team who are going to be looking after multiple services, it means that the overall architecture is simpler for them to manage for the bits they've got to deal with, they're not going to have to think about the entire business architecture if you like, just those services they've got to deal with.
[00:01:09] It also, gives you a lot of flexibility as well.
[00:01:13] If you need to scale part of your system, for example, if you suddenly get a massive influx of orders or something like that, you might want to scale the bit that deals with the orders without having to scale up everything and wasting a lot of resource.
[00:01:28] Dan: So is it fair to say each function can work independently?
[00:01:31] Lee: Absolutely.
[00:01:32] Yeah, that's the whole point of the microservices is to allow those, little pieces to work independently and be scaled independently and allow your developers to really focus on what they're doing with those services.
[00:01:45] Dan: Could you speak to then, maybe the practical, uh, benefits of using the microservices in a business setting?
[00:01:52] Lee: Yeah, the main one I touched on a moment ago was that you can scale them all independently and it gives you better budgetary control over your hosting infrastructure.
[00:02:02] Because rather than scaling up everything because it's one massive monolithic system, you only have to scale that piece that you need to scale up.
[00:02:12] And you may not have to scale it as much because you're not dealing with everything in that one service.
[00:02:19] That can lead to cost savings for business as well um, because again, you can host each individual piece in the best place for it.
[00:02:28] You don't have to host them all in the same architecture or even on the same platform.
[00:02:33] And it can also that there's a kind of a by product you can get from this as well of increased efficiency and increased speed of development.
[00:02:42] It's a bit harder to quantify, but by being able to develop things faster, develop new features faster, move more quickly and more agile in the marketplace, you can leverage other business benefits that could get you to market quicker with new features.
[00:02:57] It could lead to, increased uptake of your product because you're able to move more quickly on things.
[00:03:04] Dan: And it's fair to say that you can respond quicker to market changes or business needs.
[00:03:09] Lee: Absolutely. COVID showed us very clearly that the world can change just like that. And, those companies that are more agile, that have the capability to change direction more quickly, they're the ones that survive.
[00:03:22] Dan: And could you speak to maybe, how the monolithic system increases risk on systems?
[00:03:28] Lee: Yeah, it goes all the way through the entire stack because if you've got one big monolithic system, the odds are you've got one hosting server, you've got one database, you might have some redundancy set up, but that adds cost.
[00:03:42] You're increasing your operational costs because you've got to have all that redundancy in place for this one big system, and when you're dealing with microservices, if one service goes down, it's not the whole system, and it gives because you know what services deal with which areas of the business.
[00:04:02] If one service goes down, you know what's gone down very quickly.
[00:04:05] So you can focus your efforts on getting that back online and In general, in these kinds of systems, there's so much redundancy built into the overall architecture that you don't need that extra redundancy of having a separate sort of like a duplicate service or a failover service necessarily.
[00:04:26] Because anything that's at that service that's gone down was going to deal with, it will still deal with once it comes back online.
[00:04:33] Dan: What are the sorts of challenges that businesses may face when moving to this sort of architecture?
[00:04:39] Lee: I think the main one is the complexity. It does add more moving pieces to the entire architecture, so you need a team that is able to deal with that and be able to document it thoroughly, make sure everybody knows what does what, where different things are hosted.
[00:04:57] Other than that, though, that can all be mitigated. You just have to really thoroughly document everything and make sure that your team is on the ball with what they're doing. But yeah, the complexity is probably the main thing that puts people off of this.
[00:05:09] Dan: Brilliant. Thank you for talking to me today, Lee, and thank you for watching.
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