Microservices Architecture Assignment: How MSA Is Beneficial To Netflix

Question

Task:
This research paper prepared within this microservices architecture assignment should be approximately 2500 words (+/- 10%) excluding cover page, references and appendix. In this assessment, you need to present the different issues that have been previously documented on the topic using a variety of research articles and industry examples. Please make sure your discussion matches the stated purpose of the report and include the cases study throughout. Discuss and support any conclusions that can be reached using the evidence provided by the research articles you have found. Details about the different industry cases studies should NOT be a standalone section of the paper.

Context
The microservicesis one of the most rapidly expanding architectural paradigms in commercial computing today. It delivers the fundamental benefits of integrating processes, optimization and Instructions delivering efficiency across many areas. These are core benefits expected in any implementation and the MSA is primarily configured to provide the functional business needs.

On-the-one-hand, MSA can be leverage to provide further benefits for a business by facilitating:

Innovation— reflecting the creation of novel or different services or businesses processes, or even disruptive business models.

Augmented Reality — reflecting the situation where superimposing images and data on real objects allowing people to be better informed.

Supply chain— reflecting how the MSA enables closer communication, engagement and interactivity amongst important external or internal entities.

On-the-other-hand culture is the totality of socially transmitted behaviour patterns, attitudes, values and beliefs, and it is these predominating values and behaviours that characterize the functioning of an individual, group or organisation. Organizational culture is what makes employees feel like they belong and what encourages them to work collectively to achieve organizational goals. Extant IS implementation studies have adopted culture theory to explain how organisations respond to implement a MSA system in their workplace, and how these responses lead to successful or failed implementations.

As a professional, your role will require that you understand the benefits of MSA, especially in these three areas, which are significantly becoming the preferred strategy to achieve competitive advantage for many organisations. The purpose of this report is to engage you in building knowledge about how these benefits achieve in an organisational environment with a specific focus on how and why organisational culture can influence the successful implementation of an MSA within an organisation.

Task Instructions (the scenario)
You suppose to work for your selected organization and have read reports of other organisations leveraging the MSA application in three areas (innovation, augmented reality and supply chain). Accordingly, you need to prepare a research report for management on how the MSA application can be used to deliver benefits in these areas as well as how and why organisational culture can influence the successful implementation of an MSA. Use at least 2 different case study examples for showing the benefits can be achieved by organisations.

Answer

Introduction

This digital era has become more competitive to business that needs continuous development to enhance their productivity. The main reason behind the competitiveness of business mentioned within this microservices architecture assignment is due to the shareholder view on innovation and ideas on business. The growth of the technology has made the organization and companies upgrade their business in today’s digital platform to satisfy their customers and clients. A complex architectural design can be achieved using Microservice architecture as it allows a group of small autonomous services to develop a complete application or service. Netflix is considered the best online subscription video streaming service to date. The company started nearly before the past two decades just like as subscription for DVD provider later moved to online subscription for digital media. Now, it has become a leading online video streaming company. The popularity and fast access have played an important role in the company due to cloud adoption. This popularity is due to the use of MSA (Microservices Architecture) by Netflix. They chose AWS cloud to migrate their IT infrastructure because AWS provides high reliability, eliminates heavy load, high scalability, and availability (Baškarada, et al., 2018).

This report discusses how Microservice architecture will be beneficial in providing functional business needs. The analysis on three specific business facilities has been discussed and the report concludes with the overview of the Microservice architecture and how this architecture provides benefits to a business and reason to consider Microservice as the best even today. The discussion about business innovation augmented reality, and supply chain by the benefits of Microservice architecture is also mentioned.

Overview - Netflix 

Netflix is the most subscribed online video streaming service in this digital world. The starting of Netflix from a traditional monolithic architecture into Microservice architecture provides various advantages to its business. They plan to optimize their speed, enhance response time, and develop changes cost-effectively. These can be achieved by adopting Microservice architecture and the need to focus on specific business requirements like innovation, augmented reality, and supply chain will be discussed with some challenges and advantages.

Benefits Of Microservice Architecture

The issues faced by Netflix before adopting Microservice architecture are service outage, scalable issues, and shipping issues on DVDs to its subscribed members. They faced these issues and plans to move to the cloud for scalability by choosing AWS (Amazon Web Services). The stating of Netflix cloud-based service is in monolithic architecture and gradually moved to Microservice architecture. They start the service with non-customer facing and move to customer-facing using Microservice that overcomes the issue faced by Netflix in an earlier stage like outage service issue and scalable issue. The new Netflix gateway today handle nearly a billion API request, managed by various hosting server (Microservice) around nearly 500 hosting cloud Microservice and gradually increased to 700. Netflix streams more than 250 million videos over 139 million subscribers in 190 countries and expands to grow more in the future.

The common benefits of Microservice architecture to an organization is listed below,

• Improved productivity
• Better resiliency
• Increased scalability
• Continuous delivery
• Optimized business functionalities

These are the common benefits of having Microservice Architecture in a business as Microservice helps in improving the agility that helps in managing the changes easily and quickly. The main advantage of having Microservice architecture in the supply chain are agility, efficiency, resiliency, and cost-saving.

Agility – Allows the developer to develop and test the newly created process, functions, tasks, and operations within a specific area of an application.

Efficiency – fewer resources will make the system more efficient by using code efficiently.

Resiliency – ensure the functionality of the entire system without much interruption.

Cost-saving – fast and simple coding will lead to downtime and enhance the application.

Microservice On Innovation In An Organization

An organization adopting Microservice needs communication and team dynamics as this will affect the innovation atmosphere in a company. Innovation plays an important role in any organization as the needs were changing every day by a customer. A business head needs to know about the recent requirement of the customer and how they can improve their business so that customers will engage them regularly. Microservice adoption by an organization will reduce the cost, time, and energy related to the new deployment as they use clean decoupling methods among the system. The innovation of an organization will be added to the organization's culture by dividing its service into the smaller domain and testing them. This small module will be easy in understanding and deploy. This makes the organization spend less money on maintenance and supporting costs as the modification is simple and easy when Microservice architecture is adopted. The collaboration will be easy and know-how and where to support the system as per the functional needs. The innovation challenges faced by a traditional method can be overcome by the Microservice architecture as innovation play a vital role in an organization's development and continuity. This helps the organization in modulating its system, enhancing the speed of the delivery, and reusing its assets. Companies like Netflix use Microservice to withstand their stay and scalability of cloud-based services for millions of users (Villamizar, et al., 2015). 

This makes the organization help in deploying their innovation and reduces the cost as it uses small modules and allows codes to run independently. So the changes and modifications will be made easily and quickly. This change will not affect the other process in the system or interrupt the entire operation of the system. The advantage of having Microservice architecture in the innovation of business is modularity, scalability, speed, and versatility; reducing cost and using full skilled service (Joshi, 2017).

Modularity

The service in Microservice is deployed independently which allows the parts of a task to be built and run separately without affecting the other. This shows that the error in one module will not affect the other module the system will work as usual. In general, it states that Microservice architecture adopted by an organization to their organizational culture will ensure operational continuity. This is called modularity, so the changes or modifications or adding new services into the existing system will be simple and easier to deploy any innovation in their business. 

Scalability

As the service is modular to its application their task can be scaled till it meets the specific demands. Each system has its needs and processing demands which can be achieved by having Microservice architecture. Netflix can receive many new requests every day the adoption of cloud-based service will automatically be scalable as per its needs with the same response time and speed.

Speed and versatility 

The main advantage of having Microservice architecture is it will allow building on various technology and programming languages. The service can be divided into small modules so that applications task can be built independently in the best and cost-effective manner. This will make the application operations more agile by its flexible nature and minimum response time.

Cost reduction 

The adoption of Microservice provides a greater advantage as it uses a small module to complete a specific task. This module helps in easy deployment and reduces the cost of the application updates and maintenance. In general, the update for the entire system is not needed as each module works independently. Likewise, the organization can host the service on various servers by making more space. Microservice architecture is generally adopted along with DevOps to reduce the system development lifecycle and deliver the product quickly with more agility. The cost and time can be reduced when combining the Microservice architecture and DevOps in organization culture. This will also ensure security and allow a collaborative environment.

Applying full skill 

As the Microservice architecture uses huge operations into small modules, deploying and implementing them will be easier and quicker. Likewise, the team between each module will not be linked so adding new modifications will not result in an error and does not need to spend time to get approvals. The team can provide their entire skills in developing applications without anyone's order. The application developed will have isolated functionalities and run for test independently. 

Microservice Augmented reality in an organization

In general augmented reality provides an interactive and real-world experience that is expressed in a 3D model. Augmented reality in business is most important as it is used during the design phase that gives a view of how the design process will work at the final stage. This will allow the organization by providing a new interacting way to its customers, clients, end-user, and colleagues. The features of augmented reality help in business as it is more appealing to the market as it is ubiquity and the growth of smartphones and tablets leads to create and develop augmented reality app, especially for business (Dragoni, et al., 2017). 

Augmented reality in business will shape the commercial fields and various industries. Adopting augmented reality into the organizational culture will be considered as most important as this helps in visualizing their future productivity. Augmented reality is adopted in retail, real estate, interior design, tourism and maps, training and education, healthcare, the dating industry, and the entertainment industry. Netflix has a widespread architecture that has millions of calls every day on providing streaming video API and each API prompts these additional calls in backend service. The future of Netflix planning on developing an application for augmented reality headsets and HoloLens. Augmented reality will provide some additional interaction to the audience to experience as an active participant to feel them as the real world to the virtual side (Taibi, et al., 2017).

The reason for having augmented reality in an organization like Netflix is an augmented reality can modify the expectation on how the customer interacts with their business. The traditional method of differentiating adopters can be overcome by using augmented reality as it provides a new path to serve its customer by engaging them. The main reason on adopting augmented reality by an organization like Netflix is (Alshuqayran, et al., 2016)

• The high touch products category video streams sales conversion will increase
• Interaction can be deeper compared to others when using augmented reality enriched with CX
• Augmented reality will provide how to view that makes the service cost-effective

Microservice Supply chain in an organization

Supply chains play an important role in an organization as today’s organization needs flexibility, customer experience, and agility when they have their IT agenda. This could result in embracing new and iterative ways to engage with their clients, customers, and suppliers, a new way of working environment, innovative technology in their business plan as an organizational culture which could help in achieving long-term success in their business continuity. Microservice Architecture adopts these shifts of the supply chain that will respond directly to many challenges faced by the monolithic service. Microservice architecture has the package and development concepts that help in creating the agility of the technical needs of the development by reducing the size and dependencies between the components in the development DevOps model application. The agility of the software will define the quality so when moving to or adopting Microservice architecture it simply defines investing in agility (Taibi, et al., 2017).

The challenges like volatile cloud workload, e-commerce spikes, delivery planning, and workforce challenges, etc. these challenges will have occurred in a monolithic IT environment on an organization that mostly rely on the agility of service and business continuity in the supply chain were difficult in changing any modification which results in integration error and the whole working of the application will be failed. This needs an overall upgrade and innovation. Innovation is important as it will take the present business method to more advance in the future. 

This can be achieved by adopting Microservice in their organizational culture as it allows deploying service independently without waiting for the other service model to finish the modules. This allows the supply chain to achieve the ability for modifying and can redeploy the service when needed. This is the advanced operation in an organizational culture for an organization as the customer needs and behavior has been changed frequently. Microservice to Netflix now will be more adaptive and provide a high response of the supply chain so that various organizations and companies can access than ever in the past. This also helps in engaging the students in educational class and students will feel the real-world experience due to the interaction experienced by students. This interaction makes them more attentive that makes them remember easily (Rajagopalan, et al., 2018).

Conclusion

The report discussed how the Microservice architecture provides various benefits in business mainly in these three areas. This Microservice architecture helps in bringing a new revolution into the business in scalability, agility, response time, and continuous delivery. The main concepts discussed in this report are about business innovation, augmented reality, and supply chain and how these concepts' adoption in organizational culture helps their employees to encourage them in achieving their organizational business goals. Innovation is highly needed for business continuity in this digital world, augmented reality helps in better understanding of data by visually experiencing the situation, and supply chain helps in customer response, communication, their interaction in both internal and external entities. Microservice architecture on adopting in Netflix will solve its complexities by focusing on its innovation, augmented reality, and supply chain concepts into its organizational culture. This report tends to explain how beneficial Microservice architecture is in Netflix's innovation, augmented reality in entertainment, and supply chain to its customer response. As Microservice is descendants of service-oriented architecture that provides agility, flexibility, and efficiency that enhance the organization's business-IT alignment for better use. The advantage of Microservice architecture is flexibility, reusability, reduced risk, reduced cost, scalability, continuous delivery, more storage space, easy collaboration, agility, and adaptability this makes Netflix have Microservice to perform their daily task over million users which makes the service more secure, speed and quick in accessing.

References

Baškarada, S., Nguyen, V., &Koronios, A. (2018). Architecting microservices: Practical opportunities and challenges. Journal of Computer Information Systems.

Joshi, S. (2017, July). Organization & cultural impact of microservices architecture. In International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics (pp. 89-95). Springer, Cham.

Dragoni, N., Lanese, I., Larsen, S. T., Mazzara, M., Mustafin, R., & Safina, L. (2017, June). Microservices: How to make your application scale. In International Andrei Ershov Memorial Conference on Perspectives of System Informatics (pp. 95-104). Springer, Cham.

Villamizar, M., Garcés, O., Castro, H., Verano, M., Salamanca, L., Casallas, R., & Gil, S. (2015, September). Evaluating the monolithic and the microservice architecture pattern to deploy web applications in the cloud. Microservices architecture assignment In 2015 10th Computing Colombian Conference (10CCC) (pp. 583-590). IEEE.

Alshuqayran, N., Ali, N., & Evans, R. (2016, November). A systematic mapping study in a microservice architecture. In 2016 IEEE 9th International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing and Applications (SOCA) (pp. 44-51). IEEE.

Taibi, D., Lenarduzzi, V., &Pahl, C. (2017). Processes, motivations, and issues for migrating to microservices architectures: An empirical investigation. IEEE Cloud Computing, 4(5), 22-32.

Pradhan, R., & Dash, A. K. (2020). An Overview of Microservices. ICDSMLA 2019, 620-625.

Taibi, D., Lenarduzzi, V., Pahl, C., & Janes, A. (2017, May). Microservices in agile software development: a workshop-based study into issues, advantages, and disadvantages. In Proceedings of the XP2017 Scientific Workshops (pp. 1-5).

Rajagopalan, S., Nagpurkar, P., Eilam, T., Jamjoom, H., Lev-Ran, E., Bortnikov, V., &Budinsky, F. (2016). Opportunities and challenges in adopting microservice architecture for enterprise workloads. In USENIX Annual Technical Conference.