2 min Devops

‘Microservices are growing in popularity’

‘Microservices are growing in popularity’

The use of microservices is growing in popularity. Researchers at O’Reilly concluded this in a recent study called ‘Microservices Adoption in 2020’. Businesses are embracing microservices primarily to break down their existing ‘monolithic’ IT environments into smaller IT services that are easier to manage and implement. Containers are increasingly used for microservices.

According to IT researchers at O’Reilly, microservices are gaining in popularity within the business community. According to the research, more than 77 percent of businesses have now embraced microservices.

The main reason for deploying microservices is to transform existing monolithic IT environments, systems, architectures and applications into more flexible applications and solutions. This should provide businesses with more management capabilities and the ability to scale up and scale down capacity.

Switch to microservices is often a guaranteed success

Almost all of the respondents consider the switch to microservices as a great success. Nearly one-third expect to benefit a lot from the technology, especially when it comes to migrating their systems to microservices.

Above all, the deployment of microservices provides businesses with greater flexibility, followed by ‘the ability to respond quickly to changing technology and business requirements’. Increased scalability and the ability to refresh the code are often mentioned as achieved benefits. Surprisingly, cost savings are mentioned the least amount of times, according to the research results.

Microservices in containers

The research also looked at the extent to which microservices are implemented as containers. Three-quarters of the respondents indicate that they have achieved complete success with microservices as containers. Two-thirds of respondents rolled out some of their microservices with containers.

Decreased use of containers

However, the adoption of containers for microservices was less than the container adoption in the 2018 research, O’Reilly observes. According to the researchers, the causes of this decline can be attributed, among other things, to the fact that companies often use legacy or proprietary systems that cannot be replaced by containers. In the short term, it is also often cheaper to roll out microservices via database or application servers and not with containers.