What Is the Future of Microservices?

To gather insights on the state of microservices today, we spoke with 19 executives who are familiar with the current state of microservices architecture. We asked them, "What’s the future for microservices from your point of view?" Here's what they told us:

Severless/Function as a Service

• We’re already seeing it with serverless and function as a service. The entire application stack will be commoditized. More decentralization. More towards real-time for data science and analytics. Intelligence-driven microservices with in-memory computer doing real-time analytics with Spark versus big analytics solutions.
• Greenfield apps serverless, event-driven programming with progressive web apps. 
• The move to on-demand compute resources and serverless architectures will strengthen. Better tooling for rapidly building and deploying microservices will eliminate the need for a large upfront investment. Richer third party microservices that are easy to integrate into a microservice ecosystem allowing companies to offer more advanced capabilities more quickly. 
• The future is now. Microservices implemented as functions of service (serverless). More combinations of microservices, functions, and services. 
• Lambda is disruptive. It’s funny that Amazon did containers after Lambda because the market wasn’t prepared for Lambda. Microservices extrapolate to serverless. No one figured out what happened to state and without state you have no computing. Develop and deploy code in the cloud.

Cloud

• I try not to prophesy in my profession, so I really don't know. The immediate future will likely be a deeper integration of microservice offerings in Google Cloud, AWS, and Azure because it can help them with their bottom line and make their resource usage in a more predictable manner. I also see this as taking a large bite out of commercial virtualization software, and maybe even taking them out of business since containers offer much of the same end-result and you can use them on free and open source software. They also require less training to become proficient in that virtual machine deployments and it's easier to script against. 
• Microservices provide a good starting point for the scalability of the cloud and the other benefits offered by the cloud. However, moving to the cloud is not simply “lift and shift.” Microservices are particularly beneficial when building a platform that many things plug into – it makes a complex problem much easier.

Integration

• We have the concept of A/B testing from marketing and user interface design. I look forward to a time when application and microservice architecture are so sophisticated that we can run A/B tests of entire applications and business processes. Business units will be free to imagine process improvements, nimbly implement services to fulfill their experimental idea, allocate a pool of users to try the new flow for a bounded time frame, and measure the performance of their innovation. With microservices, this could all be handled much better than any other model. If the “B” case shows a quantum leap in expectations and benefit, it can be rotated into the production environment with relatively little difficulty - you are no longer replacing an entire architecture with another, but instead reflowing your architecture through the improved components. The infrastructure of process innovation and day-to-day operation become one and the same. 
• The future of microservices will focus more on the integration layer that ties multiple microservices together. This has been explored in the past – Microsoft once prototyped a website where you could build applications by linking different APIs and services together. As microservices (and APIs) grow and mature, it remains hopeful that there will one day come a rise in such services – and it would surprise me in the least if it were built on top of common objects such as those provided by Schema.org.

Reuse

• I see a future for microservice sharing: many good GitHub projects have no real support for run-forever or run-on-event patterns like a microservice should have. When people deliver their own tools, they could also provide an HTTP API to use it on production and to speed up its microserverization. I look forward to companies offering Microservices as a Service so my apps can run continuously.
• One of the greatest opportunities in microservices lies in the potential for reuse. For example, all organizations likely require the ability to quickly reference employee information to ensure that the right skill level is applied to a given task. Instead of writing the code to lookup this information each time it is used in a process, an employee look-up service can be written and reused by any process that needs the information. 
• We see the future of microservices to include a new understanding of reuse. Reuse will take a different frame of reference from production of reusable assets to its consumption. The thing about reuse in microservices is that you write microservices to deliver a particular business outcome that is needed right away. But what if there is an experience that is created to consume and reuse that microservices during design by other teams within your line of business or across lines of businesses. For example, you are developing an application that requires a pricing microservice. What if someone had already developed a pricing microservice within the organization that you can reuse. Why reinvent the wheel if you don’t have to? It is all about creating an experience where consumption is intuitive and natural and providing opportunities for reiteration and collaboration.

Other

• More improvement in service discovery and load routing. Service to service communications. Shared libraries.
• Making it easy to manage, deploy and connect microservices will change the way applications will be built. If a microservice is easily set up and deployed, there’s no reason to start with the monolith.
• Microservices is a big player driving strategic growth for the organization. In the API economy, microservices are a by-product. More open and inclined for a microservices architecture. Applications are built in a fluid way. There will be new languages and new architectures to transition to.
• Deliver greater business value. Provide greater support for business functions. Accelerate from containers to container orchestration. More rapid adoption of the cloud. Fill the gap between the overall solution for orchestration delivery pipeline. Support an overarching view of what the process looks like.

What's the future of microservices from your perspective?

Here’s who we spoke to:

• Thomas Butt, CTO, CardCash
• Matt McLarty, Vice President, API Academy, CA Technologies
• Brian Dawson, DevOps Evangelist, CloudBees
• Lucas Vogel, Founder, Endpoint Systems
• Ali Hodroj, V.P. Products and Strategy, GigaSpaces
• Job van der Voort, VP Product, GitLab
• Kevin Sutter, MicroProfile and Java EE Architect, IBM
• Sandeep Singh Kohli, Director of Marketing, MuleSoft
• Karl McGuinness, Senior Director of Identity, Okta
• Ross Smith, Chief Architect, PITSS America
• Mike LaFleur, Director of Solution Architecture, Provenir
• Gianni Fiore, CTO, Rebrandly
• Peter Yared, CTO, Sapho
• Sha Ma, V.P. Software Engineering, SendGrid
• Keshav Vasudevan, Product Marketing Manager, Swagger/SwaggerHub, SmartBear
• Chris McFadden, V.P. Engineering and Operations, SparkPost
• Christian Beedgen, Co-founder and CTO, Sumo Logic
• Todd Millecam, CEO, SWYM Systems, Inc.
• Tim Jarret, Senior Director of Product Marketing, Veracode