Take microservices to the board

There is a fine line between evolutionary and revolutionary enterprise technology. Evolutionary technology solves problems for your IT teams – it makes the systems they build faster, more reliable, less of a headache. Revolutionary technology can solve problems you may not yet be aware of – which means it should be a C-suite conversation, not just an IT one.

Since this is a conversation that should start from the top, I’d like to suggest five reasons why C-level executives should mention microservices in the next board meeting.

1. Without a microservices architecture, “agility” is just a buzzword. At this moment in time, being agile (and completely digital) will make or break your business. The API revolution created a way for businesses to connect. Microservices help IT innovate at the speed of business to allow your business to build or change those applications that are connected faster. This means you can always offer a best-in-class solution without risking downtime.

2. Microservices are the building blocks to accelerate digital transformation. As you look for ways to fundamentally transform your business, microservices allow you to develop a built-for-change platform between partners, platforms and silos of data.

3. You can scale and invest in only what you need. In a monolithic application environment, you often find yourself in all-or-nothing situations. If you need to scale one individual aspect of the service, you need to scale everything else as well. This leads to over-provisioned resources and unnecessary costs. When your apps are built using microservices, you can automatically scale with precision – investing in only what you need, when you need and leaving everything else the same.

4. You can determine your own destiny. Leverage, by its very nature, is a double-edged sword. When on the wrong end, you can end up with bloated contracts that are hard to get out of. You often have to buy things you don’t need to get the things you do. With microservices, you can be exacting with the services you invest in and manage them in your own environment. This means you are in charge of your own narrative and means that vendors lose their leverage over you.

5. You can achieve never-before-possible security (and oversight). Security is one of those IT topics that is part of the C-level conversation, and with good reason. Microservices can offer a key piece of that puzzle if managed correctly. Since each service is injected into an app individually as opposed to as one monolithic unit, fine-grain security can improve overall security and flaws can be more quickly identified and resolved.

Although microservices-based architectures are difficult to run, the potential benefit is worth the effort. They can be hard to manage and if you don’t have the right systems in place, you run the risk of being overwhelmed by microservices chaos.

We are dedicated to bringing order to that chaos through a platform that allows close governance and contextual awareness to the microservices layer, in an environment that allows you to manage microservices (east-west API traffic), and applications (north-south API traffic).

We believe this is important to make sure that microservices live up to their revolutionary potential and can have a real impact for the leaders who start talking about them today.

Learn more about microservices management by clicking below.