Do you know the difference between microservices and APIs?

In the software development market, it's common to find terms like microservices and APIs. Although they are different technologies, it's quite common for both to be used incorrectly, as if they were the same type of service.

We need to remember that the software development market is highly competitive , and any solution that increases productivity and competitive advantage should be considered. Therefore, understanding exactly what each architectural style or framework is and how it works helps optimize results and maximize your business's profits.

If you still don't understand the difference between microservices and APIs , don't worry, the main questions about the subject will be answered below.

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What are microservices?

Microservices is a term that designates a new architectural approach in software development, called microservices architecture. Furthermore, it represents a more contemporary approach for web services companies .

It is conceived by fragmenting the application into several smaller parts that will be executed for the same purpose. Therefore, its popularity stems precisely from facilitating the process of software development, integration, and maintenance .

Microservices allow a large application to be separated into smaller, independent parts, where each part has its own responsibility. In practice, to fulfill a user request, a microservices-based application can activate many internal microservices to compose the response to the demand .

According to data from O'Reilly , 92% of respondents indicated that they were successful in using microservices. Furthermore, 61% of them reported that they started using this architecture just over a year ago, revealing the growing trend of this practice.

Small services are developed to perform their functions autonomously, ensuring that the entire software structure is not compromised if one of them malfunctions. Therefore, they do not need to share code, and communication between components occurs through specific APIs .

This microservices model allows us to employ different, more adaptable technologies within a multi-faceted framework.

Thus, a microservice can run in Python to analyze specific data and, at the same time, integrate with another service running in C# for integration with the inventory environment , for example. In this way, each service uses its own set of technologies and has its own ways of handling its inputs and outputs.

Benefits of microservices

The microservices architecture offers several benefits to developers and companies that work with web services. The main advantages of this model are:

1- Microservices and Agility

Independent services allow for the organization of smaller teams with independent functions, giving them the autonomy to execute their tasks. This ensures faster software development cycles , which can occur in parallel.

2- Flexible scalability

The structure also allows each service to be scaled independently of everything else to meet application demands. This enables teams to precisely calculate infrastructure needs and resource costs, maintaining availability during periods of high service demand.

3- Easy deployment

A microservices architecture also allows for the integration of services and continuous delivery , enabling the implementation of new ideas, as well as correction if they don't work as expected. In this way, this process of experimenting and reverting can be carried out without harming the rest of the structure.

4- Technological freedom

The microservices framework still offers the development team the freedom to choose the most appropriate tool for solving specific problems . This allows teams to create microservices with tools tailored to each task.

5- Microservices and reusable code

The structure allows programmers to use service code, since the team can use the same functions for various purposes . Thus, one service can be a component of another, more complex one. In this way, the team will not need to write code from scratch, and this also contributes to faster task completion.

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6- Resilience

Because of their fragmented and independent structure, microservices are more resilient to software failures. As already mentioned, if one of the services fails, the others continue running and the application is not interrupted. 

So what is monolithic architecture?

Microservices architecture is an alternative to the traditional monolithic architecture which, as the name suggests, is a software development model that creates services that depend on each other within a single structure .

This links one service to another, and therefore, any failure can compromise the entire structure . In this model, it's also not so simple to experiment or add functions in a practical way, since it involves altering the entire, unified structure.

Although microservices architecture proves to be more efficient and contributes to reducing failures in more complex structures, monolithic architecture continues to be widely used in software development.

However, the trend is for microservices architecture to become increasingly popular and gain market share , already being adopted by large companies such as Netflix and Spotify , which use such structures in their applications.

Learn more about Auto.Sky, a way to migrate your monolithic software architecture to the cloud without rewriting a single line of code. 

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What is the difference between microservices and APIs?

Having understood what microservices are, we will now understand what APIs (Application Protocol Interfaces) are and, most importantly, how they relate to microservices.

An API, or Application Programming Interface, refers to the frameworks that enable developers to interact with an application on the internet. 

In practice, it is an interface for accessing and exchanging data from one point to another . They can be public (available with unrestricted access), private (used locally), or partnership-based (shared between partner businesses).

In microservices architecture, APIs function as the communication channel between different services . For example, authentication via social network, access to maps, or triggering weather services depend on APIs.

In this way, we can also allow access to external users by creating robust integrations and applications through APIs. We can say, therefore, that one of its objectives is to scale one software with another .

What is the role of the API Gateway in microservices?

The API Gateway, or entry point, serves to facilitate routing, monitoring, and access policies for microservices .

APIs of this nature are used to allow applications to access data, business logic, or functionality from their back-end services.

By using an API Gateway, the developer can create APIs that enable real-time, bidirectional communication applications. 

Another feature is that API Gateway containerized and serverless workloads , as well as web applications and tasks involved in receiving and processing up to hundreds of thousands of simultaneous API calls.

This also includes traffic management, support, authorization and access control with controlled flow, monitoring, and API version management.

Thus, it prevents internal concerns from being exposed to external clients, ensures flexible security control, and provides large-scale cost savings. The Gateway also supports interaction between different communication protocols, in addition to performance at any scale.

So what's the next step?

In this material, we saw that Microservices are a solution for software development because they provide developers with greater agility, flexibility, and autonomy. 

Another point highlighted in the text is the role and importance of APIs in the development of a microservices architecture . This is because they enable communication and data access between different microservices, whether internal or external.

This access needs to be monitored, and for that, we use the API Gateway, which monitors and controls access to thousands of other available APIs and microservices.

Written by Skyone