What Is Microservice Architecture, and How Is Healthcare Adopting It?

What Is Microservice Architecture?

Microservice architecture is a software development approach that breaks down large applications into smaller, loosely coupled, self-contained services, commonly referred to as microservices.

Each microservice is independently developed, deployed, secured and scaled, allowing for greater flexibility and efficiency in managing complex applications.

“One key feature of microservices is that they manage their own data independently, with each service maintaining its own database or data source,” says Vishal Ghariwala, senior director and CTO for the Asia Pacific region at SUSE. “This reduces dependencies and simplifies scaling and maintenance.”

Additionally, microservices are not tied to a specific application and can be reused across multiple applications via application programming interfaces.

Ghariwala says by allowing services to function independently, microservice architecture improves scalability, speeds up deployments and enhances security, making it an essential strategy for modern software development.

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How Healthcare Organizations Are Using Microservices Effectively

Chaughtai says healthcare organizations are increasingly turning to microservice architecture to enhance agility and efficiency.

“Unlike traditional monolithic systems, microservices allow organizations to introduce new features or modify existing capabilities without disrupting the entire application,” he explains.

This modular approach enables healthcare providers to swiftly adapt to changing regulations, such as new insurance requirements or value-based care models, while maintaining operational flexibility.

“Microservices are particularly valuable for handling regulatory demands and interoperability,” Chaughtai adds.

For example, microservices can be used to share specific healthcare data quickly, such as patient discharge information or medication histories, improving data exchange between systems.

“By using microservices, healthcare IT teams can rapidly respond to evolving policies, improving overall service delivery and compliance,” he says.

Ghariwala points out that resilience is a crucial benefit of microservice architecture for healthcare organizations, where system downtime can be a matter of life and death.

“Microservices are designed with independence, granularity and loose coupling, meaning that the failure of one service won’t disrupt the entire system,” he says.

This isolation ensures fault tolerance, allowing healthcare IT systems to remain operational even if a specific microservice experiences issues.

“The ability to maintain functionality during partial failures enhances overall system reliability,” Ghariwala says. “This makes microservices vital for maintaining uninterrupted healthcare services.”

Service-Oriented Architecture vs. Microservices

Ghariwala explains that service-oriented architecture and microservices share the goal of promoting reusability and interoperability, but they differ in key areas.

SOA services are typically large, coarse-grained and tightly coupled, relying on an enterprise service bus for communication, which centralizes and routes interactions.

In contrast, microservices are fine-grained, loosely coupled and communicate directly via APIs, enabling greater flexibility.

“Microservices also offer technological diversity, allowing services to be built using different programming languages based on specific needs, whereas SOA is more technology-dependent, often requiring a uniform tech stack, such as Java,” he says.

Chaughtai adds that microservices decentralize development, allowing any team to create and deploy services independently, enhancing agility.

“Microservices also align better with DevOps practices, enabling faster, business-focused feature delivery, and they are designed for containerization, better supporting platform engineering models,” he says.

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Kubernetes and Microservices

Chaughtai explains that Kubernetes, an open-source platform designed to automate the deployment, scaling and management of containerized applications, plays a critical role in managing and scaling microservices.

Kubernetes helps by orchestrating containers, which he calls the “ideal deployment environment” for microservices.

“Containers house all dependencies needed to run a microservice, allowing them to be deployed anywhere,” he says. “Kubernetes manages these containers by automating tasks such as scaling, failover and governance.”

This ensures high availability by routing requests to the correct microservices, handling failures and managing security through Kubernetes’s built-in features.

“Essentially, Kubernetes abstracts away the complexity of managing individual containers, allowing teams to focus on building microservices without worrying about underlying infrastructure,” Chaughtai says.

The Role of Microservices in Platform Engineering

Ghariwala says platform engineering plays a crucial role in healthcare by enabling agility and innovation through microservices.

Combined with Kubernetes, microservices allow healthcare providers to scale and deploy applications quickly, offering essential capabilities such as resilience, security and compliance.

“As healthcare organizations increasingly adopt microservices to meet operational demands, platform engineering becomes vital in managing the growing complexity of their systems,” he says.

By offloading operational tasks, such as lifecycle management and database maintenance, to specialized platform teams, developers can focus on creating innovative healthcare solutions — for example, personalized health apps — without being bogged down by operational concerns.

“This approach ultimately supports healthcare’s need for rapid innovation while maintaining system efficiency and compliance,” Ghariwala says.