It’s usually clear from the way that you do business whether your processes are made up of several smaller processes: be it a white-label service or a product with several independently produced components, there are often “microservices” within each company’s output process, defining what it is that they produce. However, because these microservices are generally independent to a degree, it does mean that in order to be most efficient, many companies need to orchestrate these smaller processes to a degree. But why should you use microservices orchestration in your business? And how do you know that you need it to get the job done?
☑ If Your Work Must Be Scalable
One of the main things that stands out for orchestration of microservices is the scalability it provides. With numerous workflows or microservices within a workflow, it stands to reason that expansion in one direction or the other should mean more complexity — but with an orchestration model in place, there’s no reason it should be complicated to execute.
Whether your throughput is still indicative of a small business, or you’ve grown to enterprise-level sophistication, the way that your microservices inform your business process should remain clear and simple. With microservices orchestration, it can stay that way no matter the size of your business.
☑ If You Desire An Understanding Of Your Process
You might be looking to have a clearer and more concise understanding of what your business operations consist of. If you’re of the mind that such a holistic vision is necessary or helpful, then orchestrating the microservices that make up said operations is a great way to do this. Not only would implementation of such orchestration mean that you have to get familiar with the working parts of your business (assuming you aren’t already), but it also would allow you to maintain a better way of monitoring the performance as a whole. With orchestration tools in place, you can monitor each microservice to a more granular degree as needed, or maintain that holistic view of the throughput to understand what about it works best — and additionally, what can be improved.
☑ If You Want To Optimize Business Performance
As mentioned above, there’s an ease in troubleshooting that comes from monitoring the microservices of your business. Each process and microservice therein is defined by a set of metrics like speed that make it clear how performance can be improved. Another such metric, somewhat in the same vein as speed, is timing. When to start a process or a microservice, especially when in relation to other such microservices, is a delicate matter in some cases. As such, an orchestration protocol can actually help define this timing in a way that’s far more useful to the business than its original pace. More than that, though, such an orchestration tool allows for automation of this workflow’s timing, meaning that you don’t need to define it manually for each new process. Instead, you get to rest easy knowing that your business is able to produce without micromanagement of the production’s pace.
☑ If You Need Stronger Workflow Communication
Your microservices are what makes up your whole business process — but depending on the type of process, these microservices might not communicate easily amongst themselves. When considering automated workflows of today’s industries, it’s easy to see why: from numerous cloud services to the differing languages specific to each container and each task, there’s no shortage of reasons why communication without an orchestration solution is difficult. But that’s the thing: with said solution in place, you can have microservices communicating easily, with language agnostic client generation that makes it possible to build or inform microservices of various programming languages with no lost time between. More than that, your workflow will be designed to manage communications between stakeholders in a way that’s conducive to a productive workflow — using asynchronous communications like publish-subscribe protocols, which can even provide a way to keep clients from becoming overloaded with workloads.
☑ If You Require A High Availability Infrastructure
There are always issues that may come up in a business process — and it’s your job to fix them or mitigate them entirely, unless you implement an orchestration of microservices within your process. If you do that, you have another buffer: with various instruments and brokers in place to handle process data, you are able to ensure fault tolerance and avoid loss of data altogether, even in the event of a malfunction between (or within) your microservices. High availability, or the ability to keep the system in place running without failing, is achievable by ensuring that you can avoid having to stop production due to lost data. You can also use microservices orchestration to build systematic redundancies, making it possible to replace a microservice that fails or misbehaves during the process. Whatever the case, many businesses have a specific need for high availability infrastructures to support their services — and by orchestrating your workflow, you’re making that high availability a priority for your business as well.
Conclusion
Here’s the real talk: not everyone needs workflow orchestration to make their business work. Some businesses stay small, or don’t have to worry about a high availability infrastructure in order to achieve success. But many businesses are better off with something like this in place. So, if any of the above statements are true for you, then your business is even more likely to benefit from microservices orchestration — and you’d better get started today.
