Getting most out of Microservices

Enterprise technology businesses understand the need for the their technology to be flexible, scalable, independent, manageable and uniquely testable. But then, why do many organisations still struggle with getting the most of their microservice architecture? 

Product-led businesses run on the dynamic nature of the changing needs of their customer, and as the customers expectations keep changing, design thinking teams keep ful?lling product backlogs and adding features to their products. These range from core product features to support features across human resources, finance/billing, customer services & administration amongst others. Adding features leads to data and processes to slowly become siloed, and in effect, even technology teams with a micro-services view of building their product often end up turning themselves into a monolith.

 Microservices allow for isolated, independent and faster deliveries to ensure product-led companies continue to beat their competition to the market in terms of customer experience and expectations. The solution to build a strong architecture and ensuring your team gets the most out of your flexible architecture lies in understanding your business. Teams that use design thinking to break down their business into specific needs enable themselves to get the most out of their microservices. But at times, even this is not enough, and enterprises, which focus on business driven architectural approaches, still struggle to see a significant return on their modern architecture. What’s missing? 

The agility and velocity enabled by your microservices need to be complimented by cultural practices, philosophies and tools. A traditional culture attempting to accrue value from this will never be able to uncover the true potential of new age architecture. Cultural transformations in the way teams build new age products are critical to get the most out of your microservices. The foundation of great implementation rests on integrated DevOps practices, business-driven technology approaches, and design thinking principles. The four tenets of great architecture hinge on the focus of any technology team to be across think, process, technology, and most importantly, mindset, and this could be translated to design thinking, DevOps processes, microservices-led tech architecture and organisational technology culture. 

 In real practice, it is understood that every product will have a healthy combination of monolith and microservices in their architecture, but the right approach can open up an opportunity of technology teams to turn create self learning, DevOps-based delivery platforms. Apart from reducing redundancies through automation, ensuring compliance and focus on incremental product development, the data foundation of any delivery platform can help the delivery to get faster, better and smarter with every successful, or even, failed implementation. This can further help organization to move towards automated delivery pipelines and significantly increase the release of new features and business-driven services. 

The future of architecture will be focused on modularisation of application engineering and delivery. Building components to help fuel your microservices-led, automated delivery can help to ensure that companies can immerse the right processes and approaches within the delivery engine to regiment the right processes of delivery from their technology teams. This will lead to creation of technology marketplaces where services can be curated for future use and reuse. Add a search and discover service to your engine and you have already started your journey to a low-code, no-code (LCNC) environment where focus can shift on technology expertise to business needs. 

Using microservices in the right way can lead to deep innovation in the way product teams deliver, but to get the most out of them, the focus needs to not be on the microservice architecture itself, but creating an suitable environment for their execution which includes the deep understanding of your business & customer expectations, design thinking led approaches, DevOps processes and a strong intent to build a new-age cultural change. So maybe the problem doesn’t lie in the microservices, but in the way teams are defining, conceptualising and delivering them!