DZone

To gather insights on the state of microservices today, we spoke with 19 executives who are familiar with the current state of microservices architecture. We asked them, "What are the most important elements of microservices?" Here’s what they told us:

Speed

• Personally, I think microservices are the embodiment of many levels of software best practices. The leading literature on microservices and hexagonal architecture emphasize that a service should be small enough to rebuild in one or two sprints. This may be a deep technical idea for an executive audience, but it has many compelling benefits – it forces simplicity in the code, making it faster to maintain and easier to train for other developers. It also forces good habits such as encapsulation, which creates simplicity across microservices as well as within them. Also, microservices isolate any complexity that does occur, so that if radically different databases or languages must coexist in the microservice architecture, they are gracefully contained in their own service, exposing the same sort of API contract that any other service would. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly for application modernization needs, microservices allow you to divide the map of your software ecosystem along the lines of your business units. In the emerging world of hybrid cloud architecture, it is absolutely critical that business units retain control over their infrastructure, and microservice application architecture closely aligns to this value.
• An architectural shift is not simpler or easier because it changes the way you program. Event-driven versus push. Once you get there it’s more efficient with isolated service codes. Serverless as a development platform makes microservices more usable. Translates to the client doing single page web apps with microservices.
• Faster speed to market and realization of value with cloud scaling as a service. Also, the functionality is completely separated with formal connections via APIs. Able to integrate more services. Process changes are harder for individual teams and product managers getting the product to market since they are managing dependencies among six to 12 pieces.
• More frequent deployments. Less manual testing, more automated testing. Zero downtime deployment. Easier to rollback. Greater need for automated testing and deployment.
• Accelerated how quickly you can get an application to market and make modifications based on APM or consumer feedback.

Agility

• Every new microservice is a new flow: a new repository, a new set of permissions, a new machine or a new decision about where such microservice should live. The number of policies you desire for your services is the pain point: no code shared among microservices and you are soon applying the same new policy about logging, error handling, edge case management to all the microservices you have. Anyway, we started with microservices in production from day zero, and to date, we are happy enough with the development.
• Allow legacy enterprises with monolithic apps to become more agile to make the digital transformation.
• The vision to create a loosely-coupled enterprise environment has been a Holy Grail for some time. While the same theories and techniques showed promise with XML and SOAP-based web services, the implementation of microservices better supports an agile approach to development. The decomposition of monolithic end-to-end processes gives product and process designers and developers the flexibility to create solutions that are fit for purpose. It enables these professionals to define more discrete capabilities, allowing developers to create discrete functions – a more appropriate solution to the business problem they must solve.
• Microservices make continuous deployment and delivery non-dependent on a single huge pipeline, and instead, can be accomplished with these much smaller components. It allows you to make meaningful changes, often with a leaner team. 
• Microservices architecture expect more speed. Web or mobile apps must deliver as quickly as possible today or you frustrate the end user. For Netflix and cable TV, two seconds are worth a million dollars. More agile. Scale for large organizations. Cloud-native. Right tooling and mindset. Changes the application development ecosystem. Teams are more collaborative because microservices are more collaborative. Have a security mindset in place from the beginning.

Source: DZone