Microservices Evolution: Changes Over the Past Year

2016 proved to be the year of Cloud, DevOps, and Microservices. While organizations across the globe realized that Microservices was a great way to leverage the potential of the cloud, it was made evident that DevOps and Microservices worked better together to provide business agility and increase efficiencies. It became evidently clear that traditional, large and monolithic application models and architectures did not have any place in the organization of the future.
Technologies such as the cloud demanded application architectures that enabled greater scalability with workload changes and greater flexibility to accommodate the evolving needs of the digital enterprise. 2016 proved that monolithic application architectures running on the cloud did not deliver the promised benefits of the cloud and that a Microservices architecture was best suited to leverage the benefit of this technology.

1. The Bump on the Road
   In one of our blogs published last year, we had spoken of Microservices and the testing needs of applications built using the microservices architecture. One of the greatest challenges of microservices testing is testing each and every component individually as well as a part of an interconnected system.
   Each component or service is expected to be a part of an interconnected structure and yet is independent of it. However, as Microservices adoption increased, a number of organizations also realized that despite the promise, latency issues when accessing these applications continued. Along with this, Microservices brokered by API management tools further escalated the latency problem since that introduced an additional layer between the user and the microservice. Also, Microservices used up a large amount of virtual machine resources when they were deployed on virtual machines.
2. Microservices and Containers — A Match Made In Heaven
   In 2016, the value of using Microservices and the Cloud became evident. 2017 promises to show the value of Microservices with Containers to break the barriers that impede cloud usage. One of the key problems plaguing Microservices in 2017 is that of resource efficiency and Containers can be used to solve this problem. Organizations are leaning in to use Containers with Microservices.
   Containers increase the performance of these applications and aid portability and also decrease hardware overhead costs.Containers, unlike virtual machines, allows the break down of the application into modular parts. This allows different development teams to work on different parts of the application simultaneously without impacting the other parts. This aids the speed of development, testing, application upgrades and deployment. Since there is a reduced duplication of large software elements, multiple microservices can easily run on a single server.
   As compared to VMs, Microservices would deploy faster on Containers. This helps during horizontal scaling of applications or services with load or if a microservice has to be redeployed.Along with increasing resource and deployment efficiency, Container adoption in Microservices has been increasing owing to the level of application optimization Containers offer.
   Container clouds also are networked on a much larger scale and allow the service discovery pattern to locate new services in the microservices architecture. While this level of optimization can be achieved by VM's, it becomes more complex since these demand explicit management policies.
3. Rise of Microservices In DevOps:
   The past year also saw an increased use of Microservices in DevOps. Since Microservices offers the benefits of scalability, modifiability, and management owing to its independent structure, it fits in comfortably with the DevOps concept.
   Microservices offer the benefit of increased agility owing to shorter build, test and deployment cycles, making it perfect to complement a DevOps environment. With the increasing adoption of Containers in Microservices, organizations are now able to use the DevOps environment better to deliver new services by streamlining the DevOps workflow. Fault isolation also becomes inherently easier by using Microservices in DevOps. Each service can be deployed independently and identifying a problematic component becomes easier.
4. Automation Focus Increases:
   Organizations leveraging Microservices and DevOps are also increasing the levels of automation in the testing initiatives. Owing to the DevOps methodology, test automation has found a firm footing in the microservices landscape with testing in production, proactive monitoring and alerts becoming a part of the overall quality plan.A year is a long time in the field of software development.
   When it comes to Microservices we are seeing organizations leveraging development methodologies like DevOps and technologies such as Containers in a symbiotic manner to propel growth, increases efficiencies and improve business outcomes for all. How has your Microservices journey been?