Microservices Adoption in 2020

Chapter 1. Microservices Everywhere

Microservices seem to be everywhere. Scratch that: talk about microservices seems to be everywhere.

And that’s the problem. Thinkers as dissimilar as Plato, Robert Boyle, and Keith Richards tend to agree about one thing: Talk is cheap. So we wanted to determine to what extent, and how, O’Reilly subscribers are empirically using microservices. In other words, how long have people been using them? What are they using them for? Are they having success? If so, what kinds of benefits are they seeing? What can we learn from their failures?

So we did what we usually do: we ran a survey. The survey ran from January 31, 2020 through February 29; we had 1502 respondents from the readers of our mailing lists. Here’s a summary of our key findings:

Most adopters are successful with microservices

A minority (under 10%) reports “complete success,” but a clear majority (55%) describes their use as at least “mostly successful” and 92% of the respondents had at least some success.

Microservices practices are surprisingly mature

About 28% of respondents say their organizations have been using microservices for at least three years; more than three-fifths (61%) of the respondents have been using microservices for a year or more.

Adopters are betting big on microservices

Almost one-third (29%) of respondents say their employers are migrating or implementing a majority of their systems (over 50%) using microservices.

Success with microservices means owning the ...