These past years have been very technologically advancing for our society. In recent years, a lot of technology emerged and new technologies have been introduced as well.
Microservices in IoT is a software architecture approach in which the IoT system is divided into small parts and independent services.
There are several advantages of microservices, such as :
- It allows the developers to divide the IoT system into small and manageable parts, allowing the team of developers to each focus on a single task.
- It improves the efficiency as each team member can focus on a single microservice at a time.
- In this, updating or replacing service in the system is easier and better as the whole system needs not to be disturbed.
But communication between microservices and their data management can be very complex. IT trends or applications of microservices are as follows:
- AI or ML: This is very frequently used in various IoT applications to improve efficiency, performance, and decision making.
- Containerization: It is a technology that allows applications to be packaged and deployed in a standardized way. This can make it easier to develop, deploy, and manage microservices. Containers are also lightweight and portable, which makes them well-suited for edge computing applications.
- Security: This is one of the major concerns in IoT applications, as they often deal with very private and sensitive data. As microservices allow to split the system into small parts, it makes it easier to protect and isolate the individual microservices.
- GraphQL: Generally everywhere REST APIs are used in most cases, but nowadays GraphQL is gaining momentum as it is considered a good alternative to the regular REST API. It allows the user to fetch only the data they need, which reduces over-fetching or under-fetching which helps in better communication between the client and the services.
- Smart Cars: Cars nowadays have various internet connected parts or microservices. Things like inbuilt environmental control and their required sensors are a part of microservices. Maintenance systems predict when its required to get the car maintained, The whole GPS system of any vehicle is based on microservices as it requires various components and satellite connectivity to operate.
- Healthcare: In the healthcare industry, various sensors are used to collect data about patient’s health, such as vital signs or activity levels. This is done to improve the quality of care in a healthcare facility.
Microservices in today’s world are used everywhere, various challenges come with them as well such as it increases troubleshooting challenges, difficult to maintain transaction safety and difficulty moving code between services.