An Outside View on Microservices : Agility and Scale

Alex Bakker, a research director at Saugatuck Technology,  just put out a pretty good post on microservices entitled Agility, Microservices, and Digital Business. It provides a good overview on the topic of Microservices and is especially strong on what microservices mean to larger organizations and the enterprise.

Here's an excerpt:

The use of these APIs and Microservices will enable companies to develop additional services, capabilities and applications without replacing existing systems. This gives business a tremendous amount of agility to extend existing applications.

In Digital Business, this agility is of paramount importance. Most companies that are attempting to transform themselves into Digital Businesses are facing challenges with speed of development, and their ability to react quickly to demand. Microservices allow companies to have separate, smaller development teams that can develop services to support new products, temporary promotions, new integrations, and the ability to scale in the Cloud that will not need to interfere with the existing operations and development cycles on larger, existing applications.

In our post on The Ephemeral Life of Dockerized Microservices, we talk about the use of Docker-based containers to provide event-computing services. In this type of asynchronous processing pattern, containers are only in existence for the duration of the process – providing a highly effective means for powering microservices.

In our post on Smart Endpoints. Smart Pipes. Smarter Microservices , we talk about the combination of smart services and smart pipes. The idea is to decouple services without derailing your application. Smarter message and workload handling help you do this.