The benefits of APIs have manifested in many ways but few have made an impact close to that of microservices, which have redefined the enterprise. The microservices journey has helped us understand who we are as organizations and provided the vocabulary for defining the technical, commercial, and human elements of doing business in The Internet Age. Microservices have helped us decompose the monolithic business infrastructure that has accumulated over the last few decades and begun to evolve our operations.
- Composability - Microservices are designed to be stitched together and consumed in a variety of ways meeting a mix of business needs. They provide the digital building blocks enterprises need to operate, grow, and adapt to business needs.
- Templates - Having standardized templates for designing and deploying microservices helps ensure that microservices are consistent, intuitive, and easy for consumers to use, no matter which teams were responsible for bringing them to life.
- Synchronous - Synchronous microservices provide a simple and intuitive way to deliver solutions for a single digital resource or capability, providing a very modular and composable way for developers to implement the digital services needed.
- Asynchronous - Asynchronous microservices provide a more event-driven approach to delivering resources and capabilities, allowing developers to publish and subscribe to a variety of channels that help define business operations.
- Risk - There is risk involved with breaking digital resources and capabilities into very modular and potentially distributed microservices.Teams should be made aware of what is needed when managing a potentially sprawling landscape of digital services.
- Reward - With the right enablement, robust microservices offer a big payoff in flexibility and agility. They can make enterprise operations more nimble, responding to any changes that may come along.
- Lifecycle - Delivering hundreds or thousands of APIs consistently across an organization requires a common and well-known life cycle to be employed across teams, ensuring everyone is on the same page for delivering and iterating upon APIs.
Microservices are not a silver bullet that will solve all our enterprise challenges, but they do provide a proven approach for breaking up and reorganizing our digital resources and capabilities across business domains. Microservices give teams a clear definition for a class of API that is only used internally, powering what they need to deliver APIs, applications, and integrations.