A Case Study About Microservices and its Impact on Gym Software

Updated on January 1, 2020

We have come a long time from the days when a purely industrial company would dominate the markets. Today, any company can turn from a completely different model into a software and analytics company in the blink of an eye. Like in the gym industry, businesses have turned from purely a shop where people pay for time to work with gym instructors and use the gym equipment into a complete wellness center. They do more than just give you the tools for exercise, they give you the knowledge and cater to your specific needs. Gym software have also evolved from purely a tracking system for gym membership to an analytics software that gathers health info of the members. This is the key to remain competitive for a lot of gyms. Modern consumers demand more than just goods right now. They want to make sure that the goods and services that they are availing are indeed beneficial to them.

Gym Software Future

The operations of gyms have not changed so much until the advent of analytics. The most critical aspect of any business is decision making and this is what modern gym software gives to the gyms. A much needed help to make sure that they are picking the right path or at the very least putting themselves in the position to do so. This means that the gym software has to be able to give the best outcome given the data given, but they also have to be able to back it up with its analytical output along with the other possible choices that the gym manager has. This has proven to be a vital component in today’s market. There is no chance that a company will be able to catch up against its competitors who are evolving with the times. Soon enough, gyms will be expected to be able to give thorough well-rounded analysis to be made available to the trainers, managers and even the customers.

Another problem that companies often face when dealing with technology is the constant change. In the few minutes that you finish reading this article, a few companies have already put up their own gym software, and a few hundred move updates are released into new gym software versions. Such is the speed by which technology, and software in particular, evolves. So, the question is how do gym managers keep up? The answer is not as easy as always trying to hire the brightest minds. What simply must be done is to drown out the noise and look for the most significant developments. These kinds of developments that are big enough to do a major shake up of the software industry. Upon realizing one of these moments, you would have to act fast.

Gym Software and Microservices

One of the major developments in the industry today that simply cannot be ignored is the advent of microservices. So what is it and why is it important for you to know as a gym manager? In this article, we will try not to go too much into the technical details but we will try to give you a basic understanding of what it is and how it will impact your gym business.

Microservices are the major components of a software design architecture that is veering away from the monolithic design. In the old design software were usually stored in a huge code base which would almost contain the entirety of the software itself. In a microservice architecture, software is divided into chunks, oftentimes by feature. This was a more functional approach that would create boundaries within each function to allow for easier orchestration for the software architect. The resulting software is no longer monolithic but would rather be a collection of a lot of microservices with each having its own versions, implementations, and even repositories.

Isolating Gym Software Functions

The isolation of a microservice is further stressed by essentially being an independent process on its own. Meaning that you can reuse it across multiple software instances. In a gym software, a singular registration microservice could be running that caters to a lot of gyms and handle all their registrations in a single database. This also means that registration can be used on a membership microservice as well as other aspects of gym operations.

The resulting gym software will then be a collection of microservices that ought to be the best versions of themselves. They do a single function and they do it really well. On the end of the developer they can afford to focus on the singular functionality of the microservice. This will give the programmers more chances to roam around and spark innovation.

There have been no de facto rule on how to implement a microservice. Afterall, a vague concept cannot rules as it would only stifle its potential. The most common way to implement a microservice however is through communication via the HTTP protocol. This means that the gym software will be working with a microservice that exposes common API patterns such as rest.

Furthering Gym Software by Containerization of Microservices

After a while, software developers have learned never to rest on their laurels as the tide can turn quite quickly. Right after the sweeping changes that microservices have brought upon the software world, then came containerization. While this is not necessarily something that the developer has to deal with, it should be noted that the shift can affect the way code is ultimately deployed on the platforms.

Containers are smaller versions of operating systems. It is smaller because they do not have kernels. In which, instead they reuse the kernels of their host systems. This is dissimilar to the virtual machines which has kernels virtualized.

These containers are the latest shift that affects gym software. Containers should be able to speed up deployment of gym software and make it easier for gym software to be passed around across multiple branches and make development quicker too.

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