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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 some real-world problems you, or your clients, are solving with microservices?" Here’s what they told us:

Decoupling Monolithic Apps

• One of the most powerful benefits of microservices is how they force you to break your problems down into buildable pieces. When we help our customers modernize an application, it’s frequently a matter of disintegrating a very large monolithic system into its separate moving parts. Our customers frequently begin with the belief that they must transform the entire system at once – an approach Martin Fowler calls the Big Bang. We agree with him that this is a self-destructive plan and instead guide our customers toward analyzing and transforming only the most critical pieces of the legacy system. Because microservices necessarily involve knowing how to subdivide your application into intelligent pieces, it’s very well-suited to our methodology of breaking down monoliths. When planning a legacy transformation, we frequently use this break-down aspect of microservices to our advantage as a thought device for advancing and refining a planned modernization.
• Taking applications and making them more maintainable and testable. Extend the core capabilities across a customer-facing product. Easier to manage scale. 
• Critical components that were previously part of our monolithic application can now be easily extracted and rebuilt in a way that doesn’t interfere with the rest of development as well as be constructed using more performant languages and frameworks (e.g. Go). We’re changing the way we access NFS servers by separating this logic into a microservice based on Go. 
• Provide a CD platform with support for Docker and pipelines. Use with CloudBees Jenkins enterprise. Package Jenkins to rapidly standup Jenkins master independent Jenkins pipeline with shared libraries and components. Decoupling = faster development = faster to market = better revenue (e.g., Netflix, Google, Amazon).

Use Cases

• A retailer needs to scale 5X for the inventory lookups on black Friday. Need to scale with in-memory computing. Co-locate data and business logic together. Move code to the data and process in place. Financial services and telecommunication routing – high throughput workloads with less than 50 millisecond response times. Railway transportation provider can reroute all trains in seconds versus hours. Healthcare Integrated Exchanges with a 360-degree view of the patient for real-time decision support and analytics to improve quality of care. In a pay for performance model, the physician is working to control blood sugar levels for diabetes patients.

  Source: DZone