This document discusses building scalable architectures using microservices. It begins by describing the traditional monolithic application architecture and its limitations around scalability. It then discusses how applications can be decomposed into independent services along functional and data boundaries to improve scalability. The key characteristics of microservices like independence, smaller size and improved deployability are explained. An example taxi booking application is used to illustrate how it could be decomposed into microservices for different functions like passenger management, driver management etc. Finally, some potential drawbacks of microservices like increased complexity of development, testing and operation are acknowledged.

1. Building Scalable Architectures
Micro Services
Sasidhar Gogulapati

2. Agenda
 The Monolith
 Decomposing Applications into Services
 Microservice Characteristics
 Reference – Microservice Architecture
 Drawbacks of Microservices

3. The Monolith
Let’s Imagine we are building an Taxi-
hiring application

5. Browser/
Client
Load
Balancer
Database
Tomcat
UI
WAR/EAR
….......................................
Passenger Mgmt. Service
Driver Mgmt. Service
Payment Service
Notifications Service
Traditional Application Architecture
Easy To: Develop, Test, Deploy, Scale

6. But Large, Complex Monolithic Applications are Problematic 
 Intimidates Developers
 Obstacles to Frequent Deployments
 Overloads IDE and Container, Slows down the development process
 Obstacle to scaling development: lot of coordination and
communication required between UI and Backend services
 Requires long term commitment to a Technology Stack

7. X-axis : Horizontal Scaling
Y-axis: functional
decomposition
Scale by splitting
different things
Z-axis: data
partitioning
The Scale Cube
Decomposing Application into Services

8. Y-axis scaling: Application Level
Passenger UI Passenger Mgmt. Service
Driver UI Driver Mgmt. Service
Payment UI Payment Service
Notifications UI Notifications Service
Apply z-axis and x-axis scaling to each service independently

10. Microservices
More Service, Less Micro
But more realistically..
Focus on building services that make development and
deployment easier
- not just tiny services

11. Benefits of Microservices
Smaller, Simpler apps
 Easier to Understand and Develop
 Faster to Build and Deploy
 Reduced startup time
 Less jar/class path problems

12. Benefits of Microservices
 Scales Development
 Develop, Deploy and Scale each Service Independently
 Improves Fault Isolation
 Eliminates long term commitment to a Single Technology Stack
 Possible to build Modular, Polyglot, multi-framework applications

13. Microservices Architecture for Taxi Hiring Application

14. Drawbacks
 Complexity of developing a distributed system
 Multiple databases and Transaction management
 Complexity of testing a distributed system
 Complexity of deploying and operating a distributed system

15. Future Plans
 Working on a POC to build a Microservice, with the
technologies Spring Boot and Cisco Search API
 Working with Cisco CSTG CSF team to discuss and
participate in building real Microservices to solve
business problems

16. Thank You.