CIOs and technology teams play critical roles in driving organizational success by providing guidance around infrastructure acquisition, product innovation, and process flow. As the market evolves in response to changing customer tastes, leaders must respond accordingly to remain relevant in the market.
As digital transformation initiatives take priority in boardrooms, one area that is growing in interest is microservices. A step up from service oriented architecture (SOA) and application programming interfaces (APIs), microservices approach structured applications as a collection of loosely coupled services defined by lightweight protocols.
Many industry leaders including Amazon and Netflix have publicly disclosed their use of microservices architecture within their application infrastructure. In this blog, we’ll explore how microservices came to be and why any leading organization should consider them as a part of their IT strategy.
The History of Microservices
Traditional IT is very monolithic, and the inability to innovate and deploy quickly rested on how integrated systems were used. Primarily, SOA was concerned with reuse while APIs addressed integration. With the market falling into greater volatility, SOA and APIs are falling out of favor.
Replacing SOA and APIs are microservices, breaking through all prior barriers. With a transition from complicated dependencies towards a simpler model that enables easier replacement and execution, organizations can accelerate their abilities to innovate, test, and deploy solutions on the market. This pairs well with DevOps, another technology trend taking place in the market.
With DevOps and Agile now gaining steam in the market, the adoption rate of microservices is also rising, with NGINX reporting 68% of organizations are using or investigating microservice architectures. Large enterprises however, still need to catch up with only a third having transitioned. Without a doubt, industry change will lead to accelerated interest in microservices as time moves forward.
How Microservices Drive Digital Transformation
As an infrastructure solution, microservices aren’t seen by your customers, but can provide numerous benefits to the end-user experience. As applications gather more data and contain more media, being able to simplify is a welcome value-add.
Here are some ways microservices drive digital transformation:
- Easy Development: Since microservices are smaller, they provide ease of development for technical teams. There’s no more need to assign large teams to work on a project, risking delays and errors.
- Scalability: Small things are easier to scale than large things. Microservices enable organizations to scale up their applications efficiently and at a far lower cost, with easy integration into third-party services.
- Infrastructure: Microservices are cloud-based and thus provide agility for any organization that adopts. Components and services can be spread across multiple servers and data centers, offering innovation at a lower cost.
- Continuity: Software built with microservices can be broken down into component services and each of these services can be deployed independently without compromising application integrity.
- Containerization: Finally, microservices work well with another agile IT component, containers.
Get Started with Microservices
Are you looking to make the most of your IT this fall? Reach out to us at sales@perficient.com and download our hybrid cloud guide below for additional IT best practices.
In today’s innovative enterprise, IT exists in an ecosystem. In contrast to the past where many implemented solutions existed in individual silos, today’s implementations work together to influence positive business outcomes. This post is part of a series focused on guiding enterprises through an overwhelming process to compete, scale, and innovate in a fast-moving world. Follow more of the series here.
