The Economics of Microservices

Microservices address the problem of efficiently building and managing complex software systems. For medium-sized systems, they can deliver cost reduction, quality improvement, agility, and decreased time to market. For large cloud systems, they fundamentally change the rules of the game. However, although microservices approaches offer substantial benefits, a microservices architecture requires extra machinery, which can impose substantial costs. This column explores both the costs and benefits of a microservices architecture.