The Future of Containers and Microservices

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The Future of Containers and Microservices

Advanced Technologies & Enterprise solutions & Mobile Solutions & Web Platforms

An interview with Petrica Martinescu, Lead Architect Web Platforms, Tremend.

Microservices are emerging as the preferred way to create enterprise applications, bringing a wide range of advantages such as isolated risk and faster innovation, flexibility, and agility.

While the lack of expertise can slow down some companies in their pursuit of a  microservice architecture, many companies have already successfully managed to overcome these risks. At Tremend, we implemented microservices for several of our clients, including a large telecom operator with several million customers and a leading European retailer with major operations in Romania.

As more enterprises are laying the foundations for more agile and services-based architectures, we’ve asked Petrica Martinescu, Lead Architect in Tremend, for his perspective on where the industry goes from here:

Where are companies when it comes to container and microservices adoption?

  • We have been working with containerized applications for some years now and we see more and more clients focusing proactively on adopting a microservice-based architecture for their internal infrastructure. The key takeaways in making this adoption smooth are flexibility in choosing the right technology for the job, modularization of the application, streamlining the process of spinning up new environments, and accelerating the development process by working in parallel on multiple functionalities using smaller, more agile and self-governed engineering teams.

How do you see the container and microservices adoption changing in large enterprises in the year ahead?

  • The change will happen gradually, slow at first and then more and more accelerated as large enterprises develop knowledge and the right processes in place to sustain a containerized infrastructure. Enterprises will make use of strangler patterns to gradually migrate their monolithic applications to microservices-based ones.

What impact will containers and microservices have on IT efforts to automate processes?

  • Containers are taking the IT industry by storm. If you need to run a particular open-source application or library, you quickly develop the habit of searching for the dockerized version of it and that’s it. No need to install additional software or worry about specific configurations for running the application in your local environment. In a matter of minutes, you could be running your microservice-based application in a completely different environment.

What are some of the biggest barriers to container and microservices adoption today?  

  • Though it is not a new concept to decompose an app into smaller logical units now called microservices, it also requires the availability of mature tools, processes, and best practices. Adopting microservices requires complex CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous deployment) processes, distributed monitoring tools, centralized logging, complex integration tests, complex configuration, a team of developers ready to take the hassle of debugging an app made of smaller components. All in all, it’s a shift of perspective.

How will they be overcome?

  • In the short term, it takes a handful of talented software engineers, ready to redefine what it means to develop enterprise applications, to overcome the barriers to container and microservices adoption. In the long run, more and more companies will adopt microservices and this will generate a need to produce more and more tools that will help simplify the overall process.