Shulou(Shulou.com)06/03 Report--

Nowadays, enterprises are increasingly under pressure from competitors and their own customers to make applications run online faster while minimizing development costs. These different goals force the enterprise IT organization to develop rapidly non-stop. After the forced evolution again and again since the 1960s, a large number of enterprise IT are ready to take a step out of the single application architecture and embark on the road of micro-service.

Higher expectations and more capable customers

Customers who have access to global products and services are increasingly hoping that their suppliers will respond quickly to what other suppliers are doing.

When reporting on Ovum's research, CIO magazine pointed out:

In the "customer journey", it is the "customer" itself that has the upper hand. With more shopping methods and starting to spend less time on shopping, customers need more than just collecting information and completing transactions quickly. They often hope to get the job done quickly without having to have a lengthy conversation, or even on their way to a place or on a mobile device. The fierce global competition of IT under pressure also forces enterprises to find new ways to cut costs or find more effective new methods. Developers have actually seen all this in the past. This is just a new contemporary version of the eternal call of "doing more with less" faced by enterprises for more than a decade. They have learned that despite the increase in IT's overall budget, more investment is needed in new IT services and communications services.

Enterprise IT organizations need to respond to the development of the times and new needs, and this pressure forces them to re-examine their development process. The traditional two-year development cycle may have been acceptable in the past, but it is no longer satisfactory at this stage. No one can wait.

Confluence of trends

Corporate IT is also forced to respond to trends that are divisive and contradictory.

The introduction of cheap but high-performance network connections allows distributed functions to communicate with each other over the network as fast as previous processes that could communicate with each other within a single system.

The introduction of powerful microprocessors that provide mainframe-level performance in cheap and small packages. After standardizing the X86 microprocessor architecture, companies now have to consider other architectures to meet their needs for higher performance, lower cost, and lower power and heat.

The memory capacity of the internal system is increasing, so large applications or application components can be deployed in small systems.

The use of external storage is gradually shifting from using rotating media to solid-state devices, which can improve performance, reduce latency, reduce overall costs, and provide significant capacity.

The development of open source software and distributed computing capabilities has enabled enterprises to add a range of systems cheaply when new features are needed, rather than expanding the central mainframe system in the face of expensive and time-consuming forklift upgrades.

Customers require immediate and easy access to applications and data.

To address these trends, corporate IT departments will soon find that the approach they have been relying on-focusing on making full use of expensive systems and networks-must change. The biggest costs today are personnel, electricity and cooling. More than 20 years ago, enterprises shifted their focus from single mainframe computing to distributed midrange systems based on X86. It is true that that was a change, but the current trends and changes are different.

What's the next step?

Here is what the enterprise IT does to respond to all these trends.

They choose to shift from using traditional waterfall development methods to various forms of rapid application development. They are also moving from compiled languages to interpreted or incrementally compiled languages, such as Java, Python, or Ruby, to make developers more productive.

For example, IDC predicts:

By 2021, 65% of CIO will extend agile development / DevOps practices to a wider range of businesses to achieve the speed needed for innovation, implementation, and change.

Complex applications are increasingly designed as independent functions or "services" that can be hosted in multiple places on the network to improve application performance and reliability. This approach means that changing business requirements can be addressed and new functionality can be added to a feature without having to change any other functionality in parallel. NetworkWorld's Andy Patrizio noted in his forecast for 2019 that he expected "microservices and serverless computing to take off".

Another important change is that these services are hosted in geographically dispersed enterprise data centers, in the cloud, or in both. In addition, functionality can reside in a customer's pocket or in a combination based on cloud or corporate systems.

What does this mean to you?

The arrival of these trends means that enterprise developers and operators must make some major changes to their traditional methods, including:

Developers must be willing to learn techniques that are more suitable for today's rapid application development methods. Experienced "students" can learn quickly through online schools. For example, Learnpython.org offers free courses for Python, while codecademy offers free courses for Ruby, Java, and other languages.

They must also be willing to learn how to break down application logic from a single static design into an independent but collaborative collection of microservices, and various online learning sites are still good choices, such as IBM's Micro Services courses (https://www.coursera.org/learn/intro-ibm-microservices), Lynda.com, and so on.

Developers must adopt new tools to create and maintain microservices to support fast and reliable communication between them. Being good at using a variety of commercial and open source information delivery and management tools can greatly simplify this process. For example, Rancher Labs's fully open source platform Rancher provides users with Kurbernetes-as-a-service.

Operations experts need to learn about container and Kubernetes orchestration tools to understand how they enable teams to quickly develop and improve applications and services without losing control over data and security. For a long time, operation and maintenance has been the gatekeeper of enterprise data center. After all, if the application slows down or fails, the operators are responsible for solving the situation at this time.

Operators must allow these functions to be hosted outside the data center under their direct control. To illustrate this point, analysts at Market Research Future recently published a report saying that "the global market for cloud microservices is worth $584.4 million in 2017 and is expected to reach $2.1467 billion by the end of the forecast period, with a compound annual growth rate of 25.0 per cent".

Application management and security issues must now be part of the developer's thinking. Once again, online courses can help individuals develop their expertise in this area. Many websites, including LinkedIn, offer courses on how to become an IT security expert.

It is very important that both IT and operators understand that the world of IT is changing rapidly and that everyone must focus on improving their skills and expertise.

How can microservices benefit enterprises?

Microservice, the latest development of distributed computing, has brought a lot of practical and measurable benefits for enterprises. After the IT organization adopts this form of distributed computing, the development time and cost can be greatly reduced. Each service can then be developed in parallel and refined as needed without having to stop or redesign the entire application.

Development teams can focus on developer productivity and still provide new application functionality quickly and online. Operations teams can focus on defining acceptable rules for application execution and enforcing them through orchestration and management tools.

What are the new challenges facing enterprises?

Like any IT approach, the application of micro-service architecture brings benefits as well as challenges.

Monitoring and managing a large number of "mobile parts" is more challenging than dealing with some single applications. The adoption of an enterprise management framework can help address these challenges. In addition, the security of this kind of distributed computing also needs to be considered first. With the increase of independent functions on the network, each function must be analyzed and protected.

Should all monolithic applications migrate to microservices?

Some monolithic applications are difficult to change. This may be due to technical challenges or regulatory restrictions. Some of the components used today may come from closed vendors, making migration or refactoring extremely difficult or even impossible.

For enterprises, it takes time and money to complete the whole audit process. Typically, companies continue to invest in old applications for much longer than they believe they are saving money.

Enterprises should first evaluate what a single application does, and then consider whether to separate some individual functions and run as smaller stand-alone services. These can be implemented as cloud-based services or container-based micro-services.

The wisest way is not to wait and try to solve the whole old technology, but to make a series of incremental changes to make plans to enhance or replace the old system more acceptable. This is very similar to the old proverb, "the best time to plant trees was 20 years ago, followed by now."

Are these changes worth it?

A large number of enterprises that have adopted micro-service-based application architectures have demonstrated that their IT costs are usually reduced. They also often say that once their team has mastered this approach, it will be easier and faster to add new features and features when market requirements change.

If your business has not embarked on the road of micro-service at all, it is good to learn more information from now on. In addition, more attention should be paid to some newly popular technologies and solutions in the industry, such as Kubernetes, Rancher, Serverless and so on.

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