Enables DevOps

Microservices are one of the key enablers of DevOps. DevOps is widely adopted as a practice in many enterprises, primarily to increase the speed of delivery and agility. Successful adoption of DevOps requires cultural changes and process changes, as well as architectural changes. It advocates to have agile development, high velocity release cycles, automatic testing, automatic infrastructure provisioning, and automated deployment. Automating all these processes is extremely hard to achieve with traditional monolithic applications. Microservices are not the ultimate answer, but microservices are at the center stage in many DevOps implementations. Many DevOps tools and techniques are also evolving around the use of microservices.

Considering a monolithic application takes hours to complete a full build and twenty to thirty minutes to start the application, one can see that this kind of application is not ideal for DevOps automation. It is hard to automate continuous integration on every commit. Since large monolithic applications are not automation friendly, continuous testing and deployments are also hard to achieve.

On the other hand, small footprint microservices are more automation-friendly, and, therefore, they can more easily support these requirements.

Microservices also enables smaller, focused agile teams for development. Teams will be organized based on the boundaries of microservices.