New Research Reveals Record Growth in Microservices Is Disrupting the Operational Landscape

COPENHAGEN, Denmark and SAN FRANCISCO, May 02, 2018 -- Today at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, LightStep, the leading provider of application performance management for organizations adopting microservices, announced the findings of the Global Microservices Trends report, based on an independent research study conducted by Dimensional Research that was commissioned by LightStep. The report can be downloaded at: https://lightstep.com/resources/reports/microservices-trends-2018/.

Key findings include:

Record Growth of Microservices

• 92 percent of respondents said they increased their number of microservices in the last year.
• 92 percent expect to grow their use of microservices in the coming year.
• Agility (82 percent) and scalability (78 percent), were the top motivators for microservice adoption.

Microservices Widely Used Today

• 91 percent are using or have plans to use microservices.
• 60 percent have microservices in pilot or production.
• 86 percent expect microservices to be the default architecture within five years.

Microservices Introduce New Operational Challenges

• 99 percent report challenges in using microservices.
• 87 percent of those in production report microservices generate more application data.
• 56 percent report that each additional microservice increases operational challenges.

Microservice Performance Management is Critical to Success

• 98 percent of users that have trouble identifying the root cause of performance issues in microservices environments report it has a direct business impact with 76 percent of those reporting it takes longer to resolve issues.
• 73 percent report it is harder to troubleshoot application performance problems in a microservices environment compared to a traditional monolith.
• 74 percent plan to increase their microservice performance management investment next year.

“The adoption trends we see from our customers and in the broader market are absolutely consistent with the findings from the Global Microservices Trends report. The introduction of microservices makes everyday performance and root cause analysis far more challenging. With traditional APM tools that were built for software monoliths, customers lose track of transactions as they pass from service to service, and that renders those tools completely ineffective in the presence of microservices. That’s why we ended up with a fundamentally different approach to performance management, one specifically designed for this new era,” said Ben Sigelman, co-founder and CEO of LightStep.

“These findings underscore the need for a new class of performance management solutions specifically designed to address the scale and complexity of modern applications,” said Diane Hagglund, principal research at Dimensional Research and author of the Global Microservices Trends report. 

Unlike traditional APM solutions, LightStep [x]PM enables organizations to measure the performance of applications across service boundaries and provides actionable insights enabling enterprise software organizations to dramatically reduce the mean time to resolution for performance issues. [x]PM captures 100 percent of the performance data, 100 percent of the time in production, and gives teams the power to measure whatever matters most – including specific customers, services, and releases.

Survey Methodology and Demographics
The 2018 Global Microservices Report was conducted in April 2018 and included a total of 353 development professionals across the Americas, EMEA, and APAC. Company size ranged from 500 employees to more than 5,000 and came from numerous industries including technology software, financial services, insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, education, government, and many others. A range of questions were asked about microservices including adoption plans and organizational challenges.

Additional Resources

• Check out the 2018 Global Microservices Trends report
• Read the blog post
• Download the [x]PM datasheet

About LightStep
LightStep's mission is to deliver insights that put organizations back in control of their complex software applications. Its first product, LightStep [x]PM, is reinventing application performance management. It provides an accurate, detailed snapshot of the entire software system at any point in time, enabling organizations to identify bottlenecks and resolve incidents rapidly. LightStep is backed by Redpoint and Sequoia and is headquartered in San Francisco, CA. For more information, visit https://lightstep.com or follow at @LightStepHQ.

Media and Analyst Contact:
Amber Rowland
[email protected]
+1-650-814-4560