There’s a time and place for everything. Not only does that mean that microservices orchestration requires certain conditions to be beneficial to a business — it also is the core idea behind orchestration in the first place. When your microservices function without orchestration, a business can easily fall into chaos. But how do you know that your business is ready for this type of orchestration? How do you know your business has a need for its various services to be handled in a centralized manner, with everything from business logic to timing becoming part of the master process? Well, you might not know. Unless, of course, you come across a checklist that lays it all out for you so you can make the right decision. Here’s what we came up with for you:
1. When Your Business Uses Several Microservices
One of the most telling qualifiers for a business that should use microservices orchestration is when the business has several microservices that are essential to its chief business output. Whether it’s in-house production for a white label service or a boutique, your chief business output might require various products to create the end result. And in that case, it’s always best if you orchestrate microservices with a tool that makes the process simple to control and to monitor. With something to visualize the overall process, you can identify bottlenecks at various stages and microservices to address problems more quickly, rather than having to inspect each part of the process individually. Again, if your business process consists of several micro-processes, orchestration is a solution that can aid you greatly.
2. When Timing Is Crucial to Production
While some elements of a process can wait for other steps to complete, there are some processes or micro-processes that are sensitive to timing. Whether that means that production should be slowed to await all finished components or whether that means you’ll have to automate times for specific deliverables or materials to become available during the process, orchestration can accomplish exactly that. With a set of rules that defines these timing constraints, you’ll find your business able to carry out what it means to, without putting at risk any time-sensitive deliverables or resources. Everything can be orchestrated to keep the process moving at the rate that’s optimal for quality production on your end.
3. When You Need Business Logic Centrally Stored
More than keeping in mind things like timing and the number of components within your process, you might have to consider how your business logic gets stored. When much of it is stored within the applications and containers of your process, then its likelihood of being fixed in a timely manner depends on a lot of factors, including how complex the rest of the application’s logic is. In addition, you risk error or time loss every time your business logic requires an update, and in some business settings, that can happen very often. So, if your business processes require regular and consistent updates to the business logic that’s essential to your workflow, you might need said business logic centrally stored. While some keep this logic on a separate Business Logic Engine, you also have the option of using a workflow orchestration tool to manage this code and to disseminate it to the many microservices of your operation without much effort at all. This kind of implementation helps to eliminate potential errors in the code updates, as well as to keep it stored separately from the operational logic that keeps each individual application in working order. Having a centralized, tiered approach to the storage of your business logic and other essential programming makes the process much more secure in the event of something happening to a single vital component.
4. When Your Process Uses Multiple Languages
The benefit of having numerous different microprocesses is that they have the ability to work independently on various tasks at their own defined rates, rather than relying on the time allotted after one specific step is finished. All of these applications can work at the same time — but they often don’t share the same programming language, which means that some of the deliverables can suffer in quality if there isn’t a way to properly communicate between them. In these cases, the options are limited: you either are forced to manually handle the transfers between silos, to let them proceed and risk a loss of information, or to implement a language-agnostic method of information transfer between each microservice. If that final choice sounded like the best one to you, that’s because it is. It’s what a great workflow orchestration tool does for various microservices being used together, to create usable deliverables in each instance without the worry of application compatibility.
5. When You Want to Scale Your Business
It’s not outlandish to want more. More clients, more workloads, more production. But you have to be prepared for it if you want it. And that’s why businesses who are looking to scale their workflow to allow for more instances, higher throughput, and overall better service to a wider audience, all need to orchestrate microservices in order to create the best possible process they can. With the emphasis on throughput being so strong, it’s important to know that your business process is inherently designed to run with or without you behind the wheel — and that’s something an automated orchestration tool will easily accomplish.
