Everyone’s talking about microservices, who’s actually doing it?

77% of organizations have adopted microservices, with 92% experiencing success with microservices, according to an O’Reilly survey.

Teams who own the software lifecycle have success with microservices

The report surveyed 1,502 software engineers, systems and technical architects, engineers, and decision-makers from around the globe. Of note, the report found that adopters are betting big on microservices, with 29% of organizations reporting that they are migrating or implementing a majority of their systems using microservices.

Additionally, the survey found that teams who own the software lifecycle (building, testing, deployment and maintenance) succeed with microservices at a rate 18% higher than those who don’t.

“The majority of organizations have already started to migrate their monolithic systems, applications, and architectures to microservices, and many more are looking to begin that transition,” said Mary Treseler, vice president of content strategy at O’Reilly.

“Breaking a monolith into microservices has clear engineering benefits including improved flexibility, simplified scaling, and easier management – all of which result in better customer experiences.”

Containers bring success

Respondents who used containers to deploy and manage microservices were significantly more likely to report success than those who didn’t. Almost half (49%) of respondents who describe their deployments as “a complete success” also instantiate at least 75% of their microservices in containers. In total, 62% of respondents use containers to deploy at least some of their microservices.

“While container adoption in microservices contributes to microservices success, we saw a lower percent of container adoption than we did in our 2018 report,” said Treseler.

“For some adopters, technical debt from proprietary or monolithic systems might constrain them from using containers and it might be faster and less costly, at least in the short term, to deploy microservices in a database or application server.”

Other notable findings

• 61% of respondents say their organizations have been using microservices for a year or more and 28% have used microservices for at least three years.
• 74% of respondents say their teams own the build-test-deploy-maintain phases of the software lifecycle. 49% of these teams report being at least “mostly successful” with microservices and 10% report that microservices development efforts were a “complete success.”
• 40% of adopters cite corporate culture or mindset as the biggest barrier to microservices adoption. Complexity in one form or another (56%) and decomposing monolithic applications into microservices (37%) were also major challenges.