Building on the shoulders of giants: microservices as a redesign strategy

With the rise of new-IT backed companies in almost every segment; from retail to financial institutions, more traditional companies are often forced in change or perish strategies.

Where the business strengths of newer competitors are often enforced by strong, serial startup developers, able to integrate the experience of previous failures into completely new stacks. Older companies’ businesses often rely on legacy software, composed into monolithic software stacks, with a team morale pushing talent out of the companies faster then they can persuade new recruits.

As internet facing services are becoming the most crucial factor in a company’s business value, it’s becoming harder and harder for more traditional companies to keep up. Performance issues through the lack of elasticity in software stacks, lack of business flexibility through technical impediments and overall lack of agility through long development cycles.

And while a complete redesign or rebuild of underlying software stacks would probably be the best approach to gain back performance and overall developer satisfaction, it will carve a big chunk out of a company’s resources. Besides that, successfully redesigning a complete system in parallel with normal business stays a big bet.

A common interpretation of the strengths of microservices is formed around the idea of scalability: by sharding application logic into multiple smaller components, overall vertical and horizontal scalability can be improved were it hurts. And while elasticity is a trait which occurs when systems are composed of independent services. The true strengths of microservices go far deeper than runtime performance.

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