New Research Shows 63% of Enterprises Are Adopting Microservices Architectures

A survey has revealed that digital transformation is very important to virtually all software professionals. More than half say digital disruption is accelerating very rapidly.

Thanks to Bernd Ruecker, co-founder and developer advocate at Camunda for sharing the key findings of their research with me. As companies bring more business functions online through digital transformation initiatives, the adoption of microservices architectures is becoming mainstream, according to a survey of 354 enterprises. Sixty-three percent of companies surveyed are currently using microservices architectures, with:

• “Improved employee efficiency,”

• “Improved customer/end-user experience,” and

• “Cost savings on infrastructure and other development tools”

as the top three business benefit reasons cited. The global survey was conducted in July 2018 and represents the views of software architects, engineering managers and other experts in application development, in 51 countries and across twelve industries.

Despite the growing popularity of microservices, the survey reveals that the majority of enterprises are largely unaware of the impact microservices architectures may have on their revenue-generating business processes. While 84% of enterprises factor business workflows into their broader business processes or workflows equation, only 45% explicitly document the business processes their microservices are part of. Additionally, the top challenge enterprises stated they are facing or are expecting to face with microservices architectures is lack of visibility into end-to-end business processes that span multiple microservices.

Of the companies using/planning to use microservices:

• 60% of respondents report that their engineering organization has adopted or plans to adopt a microservices architecture to achieve faster time to market for new products and services, and 54% is doing so to support digital transformation and to power next-generation applications.

• 58% run or plan to run between 10-49 microservices in production, and 15% run or plan to run more than 100.

• Lack of visibility into end-to-end business processes that span multiple microservices (59%), error handling issues at the boundary of two or more microservices (50%) and communication between teams (46%) are the top challenges respondents expect to face.

“Microservices architectures provide teams with autonomy and flexibility but also introduce significant new challenges because a company’s core business processes nearly always span multiple microservices, making it difficult to gain visibility into the current state of an end-to-end process and to ensure that errors within a process are handled reliably and consistently,” said Jakob Freund, co-founder and CEO of Camunda. “The survey makes it clear that while enterprises are adopting microservices for compelling reasons, the majority will be unintentionally limiting the benefits from the architecture and may even be impeding their ability to provide a better end-user experience.”

Companies across many industries report they are undergoing digital transformation, with 90% of respondents saying that digital disruption has been accelerating either moderately, very or extremely rapidly in their industry over the past eighteen months.

• Surprisingly, given the rapid rate of change, respondents were not that bullish about budgets.

• Almost half expected their team’s budget to stay the same (49%), while only four out of ten (43%) expected it to grow.

Application Development Trends:

• 88% plan on using REST APIs for communication between microservices, while only 46% plan on using Apache Kafka, 30% plan on using RabbitMQ, and 21% plan on using Apache ActiveMQ.

• Only 21% are facing or expecting to face security issues with a microservices architecture due to a large number of services.

• But, more than half (56%) expected the size of their teams to increase in the next year, with only 3% expecting a decline.

• 73% of firms using or planning to use microservices see it as very or extremely beneficial for building next-generation services and applications.

• Nearly two-thirds of the organizations surveyed (63%) are building some (18%) or all (46%) of their applications using microservices.

• An additional quarter of organizations (28%) are considering using microservices for future applications

Companies report that the top reasons for adopting a microservices architecture are

• Improved scalability of applications (64%)

• Faster time to market for new products and services (60%)

• Supporting digital transformation efforts and powering next-generation applications (54%)

• Giving development teams more autonomy (54%)

• Increasing application resilience (50%)

“Our survey found that of those firms using microservices, 64% agree that microservices are a very or extremely important enabling technology for digital transformation,” said Freund. “And even more see the benefits of using a microservices orchestration engine like Camunda. Sixty-nine percent of firms are using or planning to use Camunda BPM for visibility into end-to-end business processes and microservices orchestration use.”