Is it worth the effort to attempt to refactor existing, and likely monolithic, applications, as microservices, or is such time and effort better spent building new, more flexible and agile applications constructed from loosely coupled microservices?
It appears enterprise IT teams are having it both ways, a recent survey finds. The survey, conducted by Red Hat among its Red Hat JBoss Middleware and Red Hat OpenShift customer base, finds 69 percent indicated that they are using microservices for both new applications and for re-architecting existing ones. “This data tells us that microservices offer value to users all along their IT transformation journey — whether they are just looking to update their current application portfolio or are gearing up new initiatives,” states Cesar Saavedra, author of the report.
For a sizable portion of IT managers, the benefits of using microservices were realized relatively quickly. One-third of the group, 33 percent, said they began to realize the benefits within two to six months of their implementations. These benefits were topped off with a greater realization of the agile and DevOps vision, in the form of continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD). Improved scalability, faster time to market, higher developer productivity, and faster debugging and maintenance were other benefits seen as applications were broken down into bite-size microservices.