When you run a business, it can be difficult to keep your product and service offerings scaling and evolving at the speed of internet. As customers have more and more access to information and competitive options, it becomes a matter of (business) survival to remain relevant and offer the best possible experience and latest features ahead of your competitors.

As technology evolves, so has the way cloud services providers are supporting applications in every industry. Procter & Gamble CEO Robert McDonald explains, “Data modeling, simulation, and other digital tools are reshaping how we innovate… I think that digital technology will even help us identify new service components to our consumer products that wouldn’t otherwise be immediately obvious.”

Innovation and digital transformation are crucial to all industries, making internal technology teams and proprietary software critical to continued growth. However, developing applications for enterprise-level organizations requires thought, planning, and agility. 

IBM Microservices enables application developers to segment and compartmentalize different aspects of an application or service, allowing simpler methods to release updates, patch bugs, and introduce new features. But what are the specific benefits of the microservices model?

Efficiency

When introducing an update or new feature, the microservices model allows developers to focus on individual, independent deployments within their application, rather than being forced to restructure their entire service to make updates or offer new features. This idea fits in perfectly with Agile methodology, as development teams can easily focus a sprint or series of sprints on an individual microservice before moving forward to the next update or feature.

While it might be difficult to measure overall efficiency when dividing a single monolithic application into smaller parts (sometimes up to thousands), making the switch allows teams to pinpoint exactly where hangups are happening and how service can be improved. A recent survey found that about 33% of users saw results in less than six months when introducing microservices to their DevOps model as a method of improving efficiency.

Speed is absolutely critical when it comes to maintaining competitive advantage as high-performing companies are 3x more likely to strive for first-mover advantage, emphasizing the importance of being first to market with a new product or feature.

Scalability

The core of IBM Microservices is the ability to grow quickly. As efficiency of both your team and your products improve, you’ll be able to devote more time to rolling out new features and making your existing ones stronger. According to former Uber software engineer Susan J. Fowler in her book on the subject, scalability should be measured both quantitatively (hard metrics such as speed and storage space) and qualitatively (soft metrics such as impact to other microservices and to users).

Fowler also states that “the organizational challenge of resource allocation and distribution can be alleviated by giving business-critical microservices a greater share of the resources.” The architecture of the microservice model is designed to pinpoint where you’ll make best use of growth resources as scalability and efficiency go hand-in-hand.

About 64% of companies state scalability as core benefit of using microservices, which is almost identical to the 60% who state they’ve seen a faster time to market. After all, if you don’t know where your inefficiencies and performance bottlenecks are, you can’t expect a product to grow and still support user requests. 

By prioritizing critical functions for scale and resource management, you can improve your overall application performance.

Experimentation

IBM Microservices compartmentalizes individual features and services within an application. As a result, it becomes easier to experiment and innovate within each individual container without jeopardizing the full application. Testing and innovation become second nature when you can target a single function within a complex architecture rather than put an entire monolith at risk. 

According to API and infrastructure engineer & Prometheus user group leader Cindy Sridharan, “[Service development] experimentation often necessitates state-of-the-art tooling with the requisite safety catches in place, in addition to a good rapport between the Product and Infrastructure/Operations teams.” As the microservices model allows for greater autonomy of individual service containers, each individual team is more likely to have greater buy-in to testing and innovation ideas because of lower risk to the application as a whole.

In addition to manual experimentation, there’s a massive opportunity for AI to help test.

Conclusion

As user expectations become higher and higher, your ability as a service provider has to scale to meet those expectations. By adopting IBM Microservices, you’ll be able to quickly simplify your updates, improve your individual deployments, and empower your team to innovate your service. This adaptability is absolutely critical for digital transformation. 

At Stone Door Group, our Microservices Accelerator team is specialized in roadmapping microservice applications, refactoring applications, and training DevOps teams to improve process efficiencies across your business. Drop us a line at letsdothis@stonedoorgroup.com.

About the Author

Tripp Black is a veteran IBM consultant and software developer with extensive experience in implementing modern cloud native and DevOps applications. He is one of many consultants at Stone Door Group, a DevOps Solutions Integrator, who is dedicated to helping customers execute on their digital transformation strategies. To learn more about Stone Door Group, drop us a line at letsdothis@stonedoorgrooup.com