Microservice Infrastructure: what are the market implications?

MSA is the hottest innovation in application architecture circles, because it enables tremendous agility and scalability, but MSA isn't for everyone.

Gartner has positioned microservices just past the Peak of Inflated Expectations on its "Hype Cycle for Application Architecture" (among others), and we predict it will drop rapidly into the Trough of Disillusionment because it is too disruptive for most organizations. Being just past the "Peak of Inflated Expectations", interest in microservices is high. Adoption, however, is challenging, and microservice architecture is destined to crash rapidly into the "Trough of Disillusionment." We predict it will take four to five years for microservices to achieve mainstream adoption, but we still think the short-term opportunities for microservice infrastructure are huge. Rather than abandoning MSA altogether, most organizations will switch to miniservices.

In fact, many organizations that claim to be building microservices are actually building miniservices, and we predict much better success rates for companies adopting miniservices.

Miniservices are likely to reach the Plateau of Productivity within two years, and both microservices and miniservices require microservice infrastructure. Organizations adopting microservices require new types of runtime infrastructure, management tooling, development frameworks and DevOps automation. Traditional application servers have no place in this market; microservices run in managed container systems.

The market for microservice infrastructure technologies is immature, and current technologies are incomplete and predominantly supplied as piecemeal open-source software or cloud services. Mature and integrated technologies will improve the chance of success.

Representative Microservice Infrastructure Technologies

More about the market implications here: Emerging Technology Analysis: Microservice Infrastructure