We’re seeing a massive shift in how companies build their software. More and more, companies are building—or are rapidly transitioning—their applications to a microservice architecture. The monolithic application is giving way to the rise of microservices. With an application segmented into dozens (or hundreds!) of microservices, monitoring and consolidated logging become imperative.

For the past few years, microservices have been the talk of the town, with numerous success stories across big business and start-ups alike. However, with the rise of containerization in the enterprise, we are starting to hear about this term again as the new Holy Grail, the next step in the evolution of our applications. In this article we’ll look at some of the main driving forces behind why many developers now see microservices as the the future of application development.

A recent study showed that 55% of businesses believe they have less than a year to innovate before they start to suffer financially and lose market share. In a world where the digital consumer expects a personalized experience and real-time access to information on any device of their choosing, 12 months might be too long. Implementing microservices as a business strategy enables companies to keep pace with customer demand in the never-ending competition to gain market share.

More and more companies are eager to move their operations to the cloud. Yet, there’s quite a bit of ambiguity on what moving to the cloud actually means. Is your business running in the cloud while you host your database on another platform or while you rely on a third-party service to handle your payments? That’s a good start for moving to the cloud, but there are many other aspects to consider when building a cloud native infrastructure.

The best way to appreciate key concepts involving digital transformation is to look at real-world examples. In a recent Kong webinar, I sat down with Solutions Engineer Ahmed Koshok as he reviewed several real-world case studies that help illuminate the role of microservices in making digital transformation successful for organizations. The case studies included Papa John’s, NextJ Systems, and Yahoo! Japan.

Microservices are an accelerating trend thanks to rousing endorsements from the likes of Google, Netflix, and Amazon. The microservice architecture is advantageous for it’s scalability, agility and flexibility. In contrast, the monolithic approach is the traditional tried-and-true model for building software. It’s much easier to debug and test. But how do you know which approach is best for your organization?

‘Microservices’ and ‘Microservice-based architecture’ are concepts that are experiencing a rapid increase in popularity throughout the developer community and it’s ability to deliver simplicity in an increasingly complex web of applications, systems and databases is evident. But despite the popularity of microservice-based architecture, you may wonder what makes it so special. What are microservices and why should you join the trend?

A significant part of breaking a monolithic application into microservices involves a redesign of how the application manages data — usually through a data management strategy called “information hiding.” In this respect, breaking a monolith into microservices isn’t just about establishing clear separations between the code for different services. It’s also about creating clear separations between the data that each microservice interacts with. Why information hiding?

Most individuals who work in technology — and in particular, cloud computing — are likely aware of how service-oriented architecture (SOA) and microservices work. There is much discussion, however, regarding the best approaches for various situations. There are crucial differences in data governance, component sharing, and the architecture between SOA vs. microservices. In this article, you'll learn the basics of SOA vs.