Microservices. You might have frequently heard this word concerning your company’s agile development, but how does it impact you as a marketer?

Microservices are a form of software design focused on enabling agile development. Because they are individual online processes, microservices can overcome traditional software limitations and fulfill client needs with greater agility. The result is a flexible and constantly evolving platform that can be reshaped to meet unique needs while still working well with other aspects of the system.

People searching for effective and dependable online services need to know that their platform will be there to meet their unique needs day in and day out. The last thing customers want to hear is that they will be forced to fundamentally change their way of doing business to fit into how an online service works. In the event of a major outage in an online service, customers’ faith in a product can be fundamentally shaken. By building on a microservice-enabled platform, companies can adapt to changing customer needs and scale according to demand.

Although marketers may never see the inner workings of how each microservice operates, it is crucial that they understand microservices. In doing so, marketers can better communicate how their company’s services can meet the needs of potential clients who are knowledgeable of cutting-edge technological trends, avoid accidentally over promising or incorrectly representing their company’s services and combine their valuable market research with the flexibility of microservice development in order to create new, attractive services that quickly meet the ever-changing needs of the market.

If you have found yourself asking any of the following questions about microservices, then these answers can help you better understand and collaborate with your microservice teams.

1. What Can Microservices Do for My Company?

As companies move further into modularity and the age of digital transformation, microservices will play an even more important role. The flexibility brought by microservices means that companies can change their digital strategies and adapt to client needs and implement ideas far quicker than if they were using monolithic service platforms.

The effects of digital transformation mean that companies can shift their digital strategies faster than ever in an effort to break away from the pack and differentiate themselves from competitors. With an agile microservice architecture, marketing and programming departments can adapt faster to client needs and quickly provide needed services. The result of effective microservice implementation means a company that can respond to changing audience trends faster and more effectively than ever.

2. How Do Microservices Work?

A microservice is a self-contained process that provides a unique business capability, which is then loosely coupled with other microservices to provide a larger application. Microservices help online services meet various customer needs independently of one another. Thanks to their modular design, microservices can be altered and replaced without causing the entire site to need rebuilding.

Microservices are created around business capabilities (such as a microservice that automatically adjusts the online pricing of an item in an effort to provide consistent competitive pricing or a microservice that measures an applicant’s credit risk when receiving and evaluating online loan applications) and communicate with each other through a well-defined interface. Every microservice can be focused on a single business capability and is responsible for its own data model and data. Teams can build each microservice autonomously and may not need to standardize processes across all microservices operating within the larger website. For example, Amazon.com uses more than 170 individual applications built via microservices in order to trigger results such as pricing, images and reviews to individual searches. While this may be more than most companies would implement in their sites, it illustrates how granular microservices can become.

3. Why Use Microservices?

Microservice architecture makes systems loosely coupled. If a microservice needs to be altered, repaired, or upgraded, teams can avoid rebuilding the entire application. Instead, programmers simply swap out the microservice for whatever needs to replace it. As a result, rebuilding becomes far easier in a large enterprise system. For marketers, this means that requests for updates and fixes that address customer feedback will be far faster than they would be in a monolithic, interdependent system.

Microservices can run on a simple interface, which means teams can use different languages and tools for each. As long as microservice teams publish how other services must communicate with their service, programmers can move forward using the languages and tools they feel are best. While ensuring that inter-service communication is successful is crucial to the use of microservices as well, the most common forms of communication are HTTP and messaging due to their widespread usage.

4. What Makes a Good Microservice?

A successful microservice focuses on a single type of business service. In addition, good microservices have their own data store to limit what can be changed under them and to prevent changes from affecting other services. Communication should be stateless, which means each pair of request and response communication makes an independent transaction. In doing so, additional copies of the microservice can be added at will for effortless scaling in a flexible software architecture. Great microservices should be able to continue if another microservice fails within the site. There should be a great team behind each microservice, including a designer, web developer, coder, database admin and operations manager. The size of the team is best defined by The Two Pizza Rule, coined by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, which states that the ideal microservice team can be fed with two pizzas.

In today’s hypercompetitive market, customer experience plays a crucial role in customer retention and turning leads into clients. Research by Bain & Co. shows that poor customer experience greatly affects customers’ views of a company and their likelihood of choosing a competitor in the future, including turning clients into detractors of a company. Effective use of microservices means that widespread, site-breaking issues will occur far less, preventing poor customer experience that spoils leads and sends clients to competitors.