Enabling Microservice Success

Chapter 3. Are Microservices Right for You?

Microservices are now a mainstream architectural choice, but they are not the only viable option, and you shouldn’t adopt them by default. You need to take time to work out whether they are the right solution for you. That depends on you and the problems you are facing: what kind of organization are you, what technology do you have in place, and what skills do your teams have?

The answer to “why microservices?” should be “for business reasons.” That should be true of pretty much every technology decision we make—a decision should allow you to do something that matters to your business, whether directly (for example, allowing you to introduce new functionality more quickly) or indirectly (for example, through reducing risk or reducing cost).

Understanding what you are hoping to get out of adopting microservices is important because it helps you to prioritize those specific outcomes. It guides you on what measures you should be tracking, and it can tell you when you’ve “done enough.”

However, even if you have a problem that microservices can help with, you also need to look at whether you will be able to get the conditions in place to successfully adopt microservices. This is important because if you can’t make the necessary organizational and cultural changes to be successful, then you could end up in a worse position, with a more complicated architecture but without benefiting from being able to deliver better business outcomes to your ...