Microservices define the next era of IT

There is a lot of focus on DevOps and container technologies these days. Both are very strong trends in IT on their own, but each is also proof of a larger shift in IT culture to a microservices architecture. A new report from IDC titled “The Emergence of Microservices as a New Architectural Approach to Building New Software Systems” takes a closer look at the evolution and impact of microservices.

Let’s start with the obvious question: What exactly is microservices? “Microservices is an architectural approach that draws on long evolving experience in software engineering and system design, including the SOA efforts of the last two decades,” said Al Hilwa, research director, Application Development Software at IDC. “Microservices architecture is enabled by a spectrum of tools categories but is primarily an architectural approach to system design that also requires considerable organizational and cultural adjustment to execute successfully.”

Put another way, microservices is an umbrella term that applies to breaking systems and applications down to a more granular, modular level. Containers are an example of taking an application and making it into a self-contained component, and DevOps provides the framework for developing, deploying, and managing the container ecosystem.

By some interpretations microservices and containers are somewhat synonymous. In other words, microservices is just another way of saying that an organization is using container technologies for app development and deployment. IDC classifies microservices more broadly, saying it is based on an approach to organizing software development—more of a concept and less of an actual product or technology.

The Wikipedia definition of microservices sums it up like this: “In computing, microservices is a software architecture style, in which complex applications are composed of small, independent processes communicating with each other using language-agnostic APIs. These services are small, highly decoupled and focus on doing a small task.”

Although the concept of microservices is broader than the underlying platforms or tools it uses, IDC acknowledges that the advancements in software development and deployment methodologies—namely DevOps and container technologies—has played a pivotal role in elevating microservices to where it is today.

The transition from a traditional hardware server infrastructure in an on-premise datacenter to a cloud-based, software-defined infrastructure that can be created, modified, or removed programmatically offers significant benefits for organizations. The microservices architecture enables companies to be much more agile and cut costs at the same time.

There are some challenges and concerns as well, though. Hilwa notes, “Microservices architecture, by its very nature, is distributed and operates across networks and can thus exact significant performance penalties that must be accommodated with architectural solutions, like caching layers and API management and optimization techniques.”

In the IDC report Hilwa talks about the need for strong organizational support and an overall shift in the IT culture in order to succeed with microservices. As Hilwa puts it, “Organizations have to increase their tolerance for risk and learn to fail gracefully, fast and often in order to achieve success.”

Hilwa provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of microservices in the report along with some prescriptive guidance for organizations that are either just trying to understand what microservices is, or those that have already waded into microservices but want a better appreciation for the benefits and pitfalls.