The latest trend in the agile movement to break down big software systems into smaller components is called microservices and it is gathering steam, according to an expert in the field.
“Inside a monolith is a mind-numbingly complicated hairball of messed up stuff,” said Adrian Cockcroft, Technology Fellow at Battery Ventures, at a recent QCon conference. “That’s why it’s so hard to deploy anything.”
The trouble with big systems is that it takes only one small thing to bring them crashing down. When a single missing semi-colon led to a major database corruption at Netflix in 2008, the company realized that change was needed. Cockcroft, a cloud architect at Netflix at the time, led a transition to a cloud-based microservices architecture involving smaller, independent, modular software services.
It’s an extension of the agile and DevOps movement which seeks to streamline internal company processes to provide a better customer experience. Organizations that deploy small chunks of code can continuously deploy service improvements, and if something breaks, it’s very easy to see what changed. Implementation of microservices is the secret behind companies like Netflix, Amazon and Hootsuite, which are always ahead of the curve.
“Companies that are doing this well are disrupting the rest of their industry,” said Cockcroft. “The best architectures are the ones that are designed to evolve continuously.”
To learn more about how a microservice architecture can make your organization more agile, you can participate in the upcoming webinar:
How Microservice Architectures Deliver the Agility That Corporations Need
Wednesday, September 21, 2016 – 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM ET
The webinar features ITWC CIO Jim Love and Matt McLarty, Vice President, API Academy, CA Technologies and co-author of Microservice Architecture: Aligning Principles, Practices and Culture.
Register Now
