Microservices no longer a fad, hoverboards still flaky
Microservices you say?
An approach to contemporary software application development in which an (often large) application is built as a suite of modular and discrete components or services.
Tish and pish, what a load of old faddy whimsical nonsense, we hear you say.
No says tech information source O’Reilly Media, microservices have now ceased to be regarded as a fad and are now a ‘clear trend’ in software development.
Hoverboards still haven’t taken off (commercially, figuratively and literally), but microservices are doing well — the only main caveat being doubts that still remain over the level of engineering maturity needed to make use of microservices techniques.
O’Reilly says it has spoken to 800 IT professionals and found that over half say they use them in over 50 percent of their work (Ed — is that half of a half?), but that a larger 86 percent consider the use of this technology to have been at least partially successful.
Agile is go!
The research also suggests the prominence of agile software engineering practices in the industry.
Over half of developers are able to use continuous deployment (CD), where new code is released to users quickly, indicating the widespread use of automated testing among developers.
At the same time, containers appear to be eclipsing automated machine provisioning as a method for microservices deployment.
‘Companies are enjoying the extreme scalability, speed of release and ease of iteration offered by microservices. However, there’s no such thing as a perfect architecture. Microservices still struggle to accommodate applications that deal with long-running transactions, limiting their appeal in industries like financial services. Yet, you can’t deny the enthusiasm microservices are creating among software architects, nor their impressive success rate,” said Neal Ford, software architect and ‘meme wrangler’ at ThoughtWorks.
Also noted here, the Kubernetes container-management system is thought to have been adopted by less than 40 percent of developers questioned.