Survey: Microservices worth the hype

Microservices offers many benefits, including faster, more scalable, and more flexible application development for organizations. 

But does it actually live up to its promises? This past March-April, TechRepublic Premium surveyed 477 professionals to find out. 

SEE: Research: Microservices bring faster application delivery and greater flexibility to enterprise (TechRepublic Premium)

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Special Report: Microservices: The foundation of tomorrow's enterprise applications (free PDF)

This ebook, based on the latest ZDNet / TechRepublic special feature, examines how microservice architecture has the potential to pick up where service-oriented architecture (SOA) left off, making application development faster, more scalable, and more flexible.

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Microservices is certainly on the radar of most respondents. The vast majority of survey takers (96%) were either very or somewhat familiar with the concept of microservices. Further, 73% have already integrated microservices into their application process. Of those respondents who have yet to incorporate microservices, 63% are considering it.  

According to respondents, the top benefits of integrating microservices ranged from faster deployment of services (69%), and flexibility to respond to changing conditions (61%), to the ability to quickly scale up new features into larger applications (56%), more standardization of services (42%), and reduced technical debt (33%). 

A large number of survey respondents use REST (88%), Agile (80%) Web APIs (77%), and DevOps (75%), or a combination of these. Containers (67%) and cloud services (66%) also ranked high. At 1%, COBRA, was the least used, according to survey respondents.

Lack of proper skillsets and unfamiliarity with microservices, as well as too many legacy systems, and lack of corporate support round out the most popular reasons why companies have not integrated microservices into their applications. 

The infographic below contains selected details from the research. To read more findings, plus analysis, download the full report: Research: Microservices bring faster application delivery and greater flexibility to enterprise(available for TechRepublic Premium subscribers).

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