Business demand as a catalyst for microservices evolution

In this era of digital transformation, enterprises are increasingly adopting technologies as one of the key enablers for radically increasing their revenue and customer base. Enterprises are primarily using social media, mobile, cloud, big data, and Internet of Things (IoT) as vehicles for achieving the disruptive innovations. Using these technologies, enterprises are finding new ways to quickly penetrate the market, which severely pose challenges to the traditional IT delivery mechanisms.

The following graph shows the state of traditional development and microservices against the new enterprise challenges, such as agility, speed of delivery, and scale:

Gone are the days where businesses invested in large application developments with turnaround times of a few years. Enterprises are no longer interested in developing consolidated applications for managing their end-to-end business functions as they did a few years ago.

The following graph shows the state of traditional monolithic application and microservices in comparison with the turnaround time and cost:

Today, for instance, airlines are not investing in rebuilding their core mainframe reservation systems as another monolithic monster. Financial institutions are not rebuilding their core banking systems. Retailers and other industries are not rebuilding heavyweight supply chain management applications, such as their traditional ERP's. Focus has been shifted from building large applications to building quick win, point solutions that cater to the specific needs of the business in the most agile way possible.

Let's take an example of an online retailer running with a legacy monolithic application. If the retailer wants to innovate their sales by offering their products personalized to a customer based on the customer's past shopping preferences and much more, or they want to enlighten customers by offering products to customer based on propensity to buy a product.

In such cases, enterprises want to quickly develop a personalization engine or an offer engine based on their immediate needs, and plug them into their legacy application, as shown here:

As shown in the preceding diagram, rather than investing on rebuilding the Core Legacy System, this will either be done by passing the responses through the new functions, as shown in the diagram marked A, or modifying the Core Legacy System to call out these functions as part of the processing, as shown in the diagram marked B. These functions are typically written as microservices.

This approach gives organizations a plethora of opportunities to quickly try out new functions with lesser cost in an experimental mode. Business can later validate key performance indicators change or replace these implementations if required.