Many companies use microservices for their daily operations. Multiple advantages lie in that technology; we have listed them before. Today we will focus on companies using microservices architecture for their operational and financial gain.
Table of contents
- Companies using microservices know what they are doing
- A brief list of companies using microservices
- The future is at your fingertips
Companies using microservices know what they are doing
Microservices allow companies to quickly build, scale, and enhance their minimum viable products (MVP), proofs of concept (PoC), and full-scale applications. There are many advantages, such as scalability, operational efficiency, and the ability to maintain the product even if something goes wrong.
That way if something fails, only one feature goes down, instead of the whole product. Which today, in the era of fierce competition and multiple products in the same market category, is crucial. If you want to know more, read our article – what are microservices? You can also check the piece on approach comparison – Software Infrastructure Architecture – Server or Serverless?
But now, let’s dive into the world of big companies using microservices and ways they benefit.
A brief list of companies using microservices
1. Netflix. The company is considered among the pioneers in the world of microservices. The giant is using them for server maintenance and incredible reliability. It also monitors the popularity of movies and TV shows. Combining microservices with algorithms gives the company a competitive advantage and lets it produce shows people really want to watch.
2. Amazon. In 2001 Amazon had a big monolith. In 2021 almost everyone knows about Amazon Web Services (AWS) – an in-house solution that was so good that it turned into a commercial, cloud computing service. Microservices are fantastic for ecommerce – they track user behavior, purchases, even the entire sales funnel. Then, they generate data helpful in optimizing product presentation and the sales process itself. That is what works for Amazon; it can work for you too.
3. Uber. This famous taxi-hailing app had a monolith product. With exponential and global growth, Uber needed performance to keep up with the scale. Processes like driver management, passenger management, billing, or notifications became so painful, the company turned to microservices for performance and smooth business operations. Today, with microservices managing all business processes, the company is a widely recognized brand with millions of clients and countless in-house operations every day.
4. Groupon. This voucher website took a year-long migration journey back in 2012. The company needed efficiency, since the number of users and generated (or redeemed) coupons was so big, the system failed to efficiently manage the data and operations. The rapid growth of the company’s frontend database coupled with microservices solutions turned out to be a perfect match. The website loads significantly quicker and the user satisfaction level is very high.
5. Zalando. Every fashion company faces the same challenge – self-image. If you want to sell fashion, you have to be fashionable. How’s that possible when your PHP-based infrastructure can’t handle the load? The company turned to microservices to get the answer. The result? Treating your software as a service and company as an evolving organism with digital and real-life culture is helpful to work with people and data alike.
It’s an interesting case where big companies using microservices can benefit from more than just code. Zalando took the opportunity to transform and run their business better. Microservices acted as a catalyst, as it should be.
6. Coca-Cola. If someone doesn’t know what Coca Cola is or stands for, they are probably a Captain America – frozen for decades. 3,800 products and subsidiaries on all continents sound impressive but it also grows challenges. How to maintain all the operations and be effective when it comes to supply chain, sales, and billing? The monolithic architecture was not going to cut it, so the giant turned to microservices for help. Coca-Cola took ERP, conversions, and repositories to a whole new level and stayed efficient even when the business grew even more.
7. Spotify. Over 365 million active users worldwide and “only” 75+ in the moment of the change. Spotify can be widely known but their inner struggles suggest growing pains and are slightly less known. The company built 90 autonomous, full-stack teams to build and manage the service while it grew over the years, countries, and continents. If you want to hear your favorite track, you just hit the play button. To make it happen and seem invisible in nature, there are hundreds of specialists and thousands of functionalities that couldn’t be run as smoothly in the monolithic architecture.
8. SoundCloud. SoundCloud might be known for an exceptional collection of music and podcasts but with multiple hours uploaded on the platform every single minute, load and maintenance challenges are through the roof. That’s why the company adopted a microservice architecture that had replaced a legacy and monolithic in nature, Rails. Today, the company builds its product with multiple technologies in mind but only through microservices.
9. Karma. A telecommunication provider that found a problem in its daily operations. When the company grew, it became increasingly difficult to track the number of clients, points of access, billings, and more. The company replaced a monolithic architecture with microservices for business efficiency.
10. eBay. At their own admission, microservices had been a blessing. With thousands of services sending API calls and back-end services running tasks like shipping, this giant needed an effective solution for a growing load and performance problem. With a new approach, eBay is among companies using microservices to optimize their business operations and ecommerce.
The future is at your fingertips
You can tell a lot about a company that struggled and is actively looking for a solution. The mindset towards the future is among the most profitable and operationally effective out there. If you want to compare architectures, wait for our piece on monoliths vs microservices. It will give you something to think about while presenting an interesting, technical point of view.
The most important thing, however, is the end-to-end approach. With a software development vendor you can trust, you will take the business to a whole new level. The question is: are you in?