How Enterprises Can Use Microservices to Their Advantage

Microservices provide many benefits including speed and fewer outages. Here’s how organizations can use them to their advantage.

Increasingly, a microservices architecture is becoming the enterprise application development style of choice. It stands in stark contrast to monolithic applications, where the latter works as a large, single codebase and the former as a suite of automated services that communicate via light mechanisms, such as application programming interfaces (APIs). The benefit of the micro-segmented model is that services, which can be used by multiple business transactions, are independently deployable and operated by smaller teams.

Following the success of companies such as Uber and Amazon, many enterprises are moving away from monolithic applications to microservices that will accelerate digital transformation and power continuous and scalable innovation.

Despite the perks, the move to microservices comes with added complexity in an environment that will entail a significantly larger footprint of application or service instance. This makes it more difficult to monitor and troubleshoot the root cause of any performance issue. The role of application performance management (APM) is to ensure consistent performance by delivering visibility and tracking transactions end to end, including API calls, in real time. APM makes it significantly easier to identify which requests caused specific calls to other microservices and where the disruption occurred.

From a business perspective, using APM means that enterprises can bolster the performance of their microservice deployments and mitigate outages by continuously monitoring for critical application key performance indicators to identify and isolate a performance issue, such as a traffic bottleneck.

Using APM to automatically detect the service endpoints of a microservices architecture enables IT to shine a spotlight on a particular microservice without worrying about the multiple business transactions that use it.

APM also empowers IT and DevOps to continuously build, test and monitor microservices for optimal performance. With APM, DevOps teams can focus on their areas of responsibility, making them more efficient without sacrificing application functionality.

Further, APM uses automated discovery and dynamic baselining as analysis methods that can scale with the thousands of simultaneous requests microservices support, along with the business transactions invoking them.

Users have grown accustomed to lightning-fast speed and performance from their applications. In competing for the short attention span of customers, businesses need to constantly ensure that they deliver exceptional user experience and update their applications with features that enhance customer experience. All the while, they need to monitor to detect and resolve any and all issues that impede performance.