Microservices: Offering more agile solutions for bigger impact

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  Quantumrun Foresight
• December 28, 2023

Insight summary

Microservices architecture, increasingly adopted by companies like Amazon, Netflix, and PayPal, divides software applications into smaller, independent units for improved agility and efficiency. This approach enhances maintainability, deployability, and scalability, aligning well with agile business models and small, cross-functional teams. It benefits cloud providers by promoting cloud-based platforms, reducing infrastructure needs. This evolution in software development spurs innovation, reduces costs, and enables global collaboration, but also presents new security challenges. Overall, microservices lead to faster market adaptation, more energy-efficient computing, and increased demand for professionals skilled in this area.

Microservices context

Although technology can transform the entire value chain, it still heavily depends on strong collaboration with businesses. Leading global companies like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Netflix, and PayPal have demonstrated the advantages of merging technical expertise with customer and business insights. Their successful transition from monolithic to microservices architecture (MSA) has provided them with unparalleled agility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness while maintaining a customer-focused reputation. 

Moreover, these companies have progressed from basic automation to advanced technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence, enabling personalized customer offerings, operational efficiency, and business agility on an international level. Such a transformation is not achieved by merely adopting a new infrastructure but by analyzing the underlying factors of operating models and organizational culture to develop a supportive framework for change.

The microservices development paradigm has emerged as an evolutionary approach to creating software applications as modular and independently deployable units. The main objective of adopting this paradigm is to divide business processes into smaller, autonomous components called services. Each service has its container, programming language, process, data storage, and communication mechanisms. This approach provides software developers with a framework that minimizes implementation efforts, offering a lightweight, flexible, and scalable method for building and operating applications. Moreover, MSA presents several advantages over monolithic software architectures, such as improved service maintainability, deployability, testability, scalability, composability, and resilience. 

Disruptive impact

Notably, microservices have gained popularity not only among developers but also among executives and project leaders. The explanation for this lies in the ability of microservices to align more closely with how many business leaders prefer to organize and manage their teams and development processes. In other words, microservices serve as an architectural framework that better supports the desired operational model. According to a 2021 IBM survey of over 1,200 developers and IT executives, 87 percent of those using microservices agreed that adopting this approach is worth all the investment.

An increasingly popular organizational model involves assembling cross-functional teams to address a specific business issue, service, or product. The microservices approach aligns well with this trend, allowing organizations to form small, cross-functional teams centered around a single service or a group of services while promoting agile operations. The loosely-coupled nature of microservices also incorporates enhanced fault isolation and resilience into applications. Additionally, the compact size of the services, along with their well-defined boundaries and communication patterns, simplifies the process for new team members to comprehend the code base and contribute swiftly.

As microservices become more common, cloud providers are the ones who may benefit the most. A cloud-based platform for MSA eliminates the need for physical infrastructure and allows for the adoption of a software-as-a-service model instead of developing and maintaining software and systems in-house. The cloud is not only about infrastructure but also about providing value-added services. It enables secure deployment of the MSA and collaboration with ecosystem partners without increasing compliance requirements. 

Implications of microservices

Wider implications of microservices may include: 

• Greater social interactions among professionals in the software development community, fostering innovation and encouraging diverse perspectives.
• Reduced software development and maintenance costs by allowing organizations to scale and deploy only the necessary components. 
• The facilitation of global collaboration and information exchange, which can contribute to greater international cooperation. Governments may need to adapt their regulations and policies to address data privacy and cross-border data transfer issues.
• The rapid evolution of technology by enabling the development of more flexible, resilient, and scalable applications.
• Higher demand for software developers, architects, and other professionals with expertise in this area.
• More energy-efficient computing by allowing applications to scale more efficiently. This technique can reduce the overall energy consumption of data centers.
• Organizations being able to respond more quickly to market changes and customer needs, leading to increased competitiveness and a faster pace of innovation.
• New security challenges, as the increased number of independent services may expose more potential attack targets.

Questions to consider

• If you’re a software developer or programmer, how is your company shifting to microservices?
• What are the potential challenges or limitations of microservices architecture?