Microservices is moving away from just a buzz term to a proven strategy in the software development industry. As more organizations begin to adopt microservices, they can rely on lessons learned from those before them. Red Hat recently conducted a survey to find out how teams are using microservices to their advantage; what the the major benefits, and what are some of the tradeoffs that exist.

The State of Microservices report from Red Hat is based on the company’s JBoss Middleware and OpenShift customers.

“Introducing microservices can be disruptive to the way organizations are used to working; however, the results from this survey are promising,” the Red Hat team wrote in a post.

The five top findings of the report include:

  1. While microservices are often associated with brand new applications, it can bring many benefits to existing applications. According to the report, organizations are using microservices to re-architect their existing applications; as much as the technology is being used for brand new applications. “Microservices projects tend to be marketed as being best for implementing brand-new projects, without mentioning the benefits they bring to upgrading existing projects,” the company wrote. The report found 69 percent of respondents are using microservices both for new and existing applications.
  2. The top benefits of microservices, according to the report, include: continuous integration (CI), continuous deployment (CD), agility, improved scalability, faster time to market, higher developer productivity, and easier debugging and maintenance.
  3. The top tradeoffs and challenges cited from respondents include: corporate culture and organizational challenges, microservices management, diagnostics and monitoring, and time and resources.
  4. To mitigate these challenges, respondents suggest: developing and implementing in-house microservices tooling, a re-organization, working with vendor subject matter experts or using a vendor as a trusted advisor, and purchasing or using a microservices platform or solution. “[M]any responded that a reorganization was a mitigating activity to get past the microservices challenges in relation to corporate culture. This indicates that it is critical to have a plan in place to evaluate microservices solutions that are available in the market and do due diligence to select the one that best fits individual requirements. The reorganization of teams to incorporate new technologies and inspire change is also a recommended course of action,” the company wrote.
  5. Respondents prefer a multi-runtime, multi-technology, multi-framework. Forty-five percent of respondents cited “using the right tool for the right task,” and moving away from a single technology, runtime or framework strategy. In addition, 87% of respondents note they are using or considering to use multiple technologies for microservices. “These responses show that multi-technology solutions are becoming the norm and that more and more organizations simply want to use the right tool for the right task. This is why it is important to have multiple runtimes and frameworks, as not all technology projects function the same and most do not thrive on using the same tools,” the company wrote.