Development
Microservices
What microservices are and why they matter
Definition
Microservices is a software architecture pattern that structures an application as a collection of loosely coupled, independently deployable services. Each microservice focuses on a single business capability, owns its data, and communicates with other services through well-defined APIs. This approach enables independent scaling, faster deployments, and technology flexibility compared to monolithic architectures.
How it works
In a monolithic application, all functionality lives in a single codebase and deploys as one unit. If the payment processing code needs an update, you redeploy the entire application. Microservices break the application into independent services - payment processing, user management, notifications - each with its own codebase, database, and deployment pipeline.
The benefits are real but come with costs. Independent deployment means teams can ship faster without coordinating releases. Independent scaling means you can add more capacity to the payment service during a sale without scaling the entire application. But you also gain network complexity, distributed debugging challenges, and the overhead of managing dozens or hundreds of services.
Microservices are not always the right choice. For early-stage products and small teams, a well-structured monolith is faster to build, easier to debug, and simpler to operate. Microservices make sense when you have multiple teams working on the same product, when different parts of the system have vastly different scaling requirements, or when you need to use different technology stacks for different capabilities.
How 1Raft uses Microservices
We advise clients on when microservices are the right architecture and when a monolith is more practical. For an MVP, we almost always start with a modular monolith - faster to build and iterate on. For a fintech client processing millions of transactions, we decomposed their payment, compliance, and notification systems into independent services that can scale and deploy independently.
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We apply this in production across industries. Tell us what you are building and we will show you how it fits.