Presented by Georg Buchgeher
Microservices have many advantages, but also introduce many challenges, such as a high learning curve and introducing new complexity such as distributed systems, logging, monitoring and “eventual consistency”. However, their advantages are still such that large companies like the style. It is used by large organizations, such as Netflix and Spotify, but how about small organizations? Is it useful for them to use MSA?
The authors performed a case study at AMS Engineering. During an inital quality attribute workshop, it turned out that their requirements well-fitted a MSA solution. However, the organization was quite sceptical, due to their limited resources. After careful studying the principles of MSA, it turned out that from a technical perspective the organization had sufficient capacity, but that not all organizational principles could be followed, being DevOps and decentralized governance. The latter was not allowed by the organization due to regulations, the former because clients did not want this. However, internally the could work with small incremental releases.
Concluding: introducing MSA is not an easy task, it requires a lot of new knowledge, and impacts all phases of development, but it is doable for smaller organizations. At least in this case…