In Pursuit of Architectural Agility: Experimenting with Microservices

Modern enterprises need their IT infrastructure to be agile, for them to adapt smoothly and swiftly to how the business organization evolves in pursuit of the enterprise goals. Addressing that demand entails pursuing "business and architecture isomorphism". The modest offering of a good fraction of enterprise IT installations, however, suggests that such a tenet is easier said than done. At the same time, there is growing consensus that the microservices architecture style has propelling potential to seize that goal, especially now that state-of-the-art technology begins to match its demands proficiently. We have experienced the latter claim to hold true in a Proof-of-Concept implementation and quantitative evaluation performed for a medium-size enterprise seeking guidance on the architecture concept to adopt for their new IT infrastructure. Our project included a fair amount of technology scouting and evaluation, whose principal outcomes, all most encouraging, we report here. The conclusion we arrived at, which we believe applies to numerous other enterprises, is that embracing the microservices architecture style meets with solid technology support, assures architectural agility, and yields satisfactory returns for run-time performance.