Grow Bigger by Thinking Smaller: Getting Started with Microservices

It sounds contradictory, but if your enterprise plans to scale in today’s digital-first world, it’s time to start thinking smaller.

Today, many of the most innovative enterprises are scaling up their applications by breaking them into smaller pieces. This approach to IT architecture—microservices, as it’s commonly known—is a way of restructuring applications into component services that can be scaled independently (depending on whether a team needs more compute resources, memory, or IO), and then having them talk to each other via API service interfaces.

Using microservices, companies reap not only the benefits of agility and speed when building software, but also the ability to easily share and reuse services across the enterprise and beyond. In effect, these smaller services make it possible to achieve both simplicity and complexity at the same time.

According to one recent survey of over 1800 IT professionals, nearly 70% of organizations are either using or investigating microservices, with nearly one-third of organizations using them in production. At Netflix, one of the earliest adopters of microservices, roughly 30 independent teams have delivered over 500 microservices. Amazon, another long-time champion of microservices, has employed the technique to ensure effective communication within teams and enable hundreds of code deployments per day. Numerous other examples, from the open-source Kubernetes project to the Walgreens digital platform strategy, speak to this growing momentum.

But just as microservices present new opportunities for organizational efficiency and growth, they also pose common stumbling blocks—chief among them security, usage and performance visibility, and agility/reuse.

The microservices architectural model has been both successful and challenging—for many of the same reasons. In essence, developers often build APIs and microservices without the kind of centralized oversight that once existed, and then they deploy them more widely than ever. This can lead to inconsistent levels of security—or no security at all.

When developers deploy microservices in the public cloud and neglect to deploy common API security standards or consistent global policies, they expose the enterprise to potential security breaches. Companies therefore must assume a zero-trust environment. As research firms have noted, a well-managed API platform can help enterprises overcome these threats by enabling the implementation of security and governance policies like OAuth2 across all of their microservices APIs.

Microservices involve building dependencies among your software, which means all of your microservices depend on all the rest of them. By extension, it also means there are interdependency problems not unlike those that exist for SOA.

There are many ways to stress-test the reliability of microservices infrastructure, but visibility is one of the best.