Microservices are likely to be at least as popular with executives and project leaders as with developers. This is one of the more unusual characteristics of microservices because architectural enthusiasm is typically reserved for software development teams. The reason for this is that microservices better reflect the way many business leaders want to structure and run their teams and development processes.
Put another way, microservices are an architectural model that better facilitates a desired operational model. In a 2021 IBM survey of over 1,200 developers and IT executives, 87% of microservices users agreed that microservices adoption is worth the expense and effort.
Here are just a few of the enterprise benefits of microservices:
Independently deployable
Perhaps the single most important characteristic of microservices is that because the services are smaller and independently deployable, it no longer requires an act of Congress in order to change a line of code or add a new feature in application.
Microservices promise organizations an antidote to the visceral frustrations associated with small changes taking huge amounts of time. It doesn’t require a Ph.D. in computer science to see or understand the value of an approach that better facilitates speed and agility.
But speed isn’t the only value of designing services this way. A common emerging organizational model is to bring together cross-functional teams around a business problem, service, or product. The microservices model fits neatly with this trend because it enables an organization to create small, cross-functional teams around one service or a collection of services and have them operate in an agile fashion.
Microservices' loose coupling also builds a degree of fault isolation and better resilience into applications. And the small size of the services, combined with their clear boundaries and communication patterns, makes it easier for new team members to understand the code base and contribute to it quickly—a clear benefit in terms of both speed and employee morale.
Right tool for the job
In traditional n-tier architecture patterns, an application typically shares a common stack, with a large, relational database supporting the entire application. This approach has several obvious drawbacks—the most significant of which is that every component of an application must share a common stack, data model and database even if there is a clear, better tool for the job for certain elements. It makes for bad architecture, and it’s frustrating for developers who are constantly aware that a better, more efficient way to build these components is available.
By contrast, in a microservices model, components are deployed independently and communicate over some combination of REST, event streaming and message brokers—so it’s possible for the stack of every individual service to be optimized for that service. Technology changes all the time, and an application composed of multiple, smaller services is much easier and less expensive to evolve with more desirable technology as it becomes available.
Precise scaling
With microservices, individual services can be individually deployed—but they can be individually scaled, as well. The resulting benefit is obvious: done correctly, microservices require less infrastructure than monolithic applications because they enable precise scaling of only the components that require it, instead of the entire application in the case of monolithic applications.
There are challenges to microservices, too:
Microservices' significant benefits come with significant challenges. Moving from monolith to microservices means a lot more management complexity - a lot more services, created by a lot more teams, deployed in a lot more places. Problems in one service can cause, or be caused by, problems in other services. Logging data (used for monitoring and problem resolution) is more voluminous, and can be inconsistent across services. New versions can cause backward compatibility issues. Applications involve more network connections, which means more opportunities for latency and connectivity issues. A DevOps approach can address many of these issues, but DevOps adoption has challenges of its own.
Nevertheless, these challenges aren't stopping non-adopters from adopting microservices—or adopters from deepening their microservices commitments. The aforementioned IBM survey data reveals that 56% of current non-users are likely or very likely to adopt microservices within the following two years, and 78% of current microservices users will likely increase the time, money and effort they've invested in microservices.