It’s no secret that cloud technologies are changing the way businesses think about hardware usage and the cost of ownership for B2B solutions. Software designers and product vendors are similarly re-thinking the way that they go to market with their solutions, leveraging cloud technologies to provide B2B business owners with new options to drive TCO down and increase capabilities. We see a few compelling trends and tangible opportunities in this area of B2B commerce that are influencing the way businesses will invest in technology.
Microservices, and the more cutting-edge serverless architectural approach, allow for virtually limitless scaling of hardware resources in a cost-controllable manner. Microservices are a concept that involves developing small, singular applications that solve fundamental or unique business problems. Microservices can be compared to and contrasted with monolithic applications, which are built as a single unit. A single unit approach can be successful, but many B2B organizations are noticing pain points and frustrations with those applications as changes and scaling the entire application can be difficult to maintain and cause issues. Microservices, by contrast, are independently deployable, scalable and can be managed by different teams.
Microservices can collectively leverage a common foundational set of software (as is done with SAP’s YaaS solution), or they can be uniquely developed by businesses or third parties using stand-alone technologies. The key to microservices is that they are built from the ground up to communicate with any modern platform or technology solution, allowing you to knit a series of requests together to accomplish a complex business need. While the concept is a natural evolution of the Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) trend, it is enhanced greatly by the ability to employ the services in micro-sized hardware segments in a fully functional cloud.
Microservices can reduce the cost of hosting and maintaining commerce solutions when employed properly. Since they are designed to work independently, they can be modified and managed independently. This means shorter software development lifecycle time and reduced change management concerns, which enables rapid, small change deployments without sacrificing quality. Deploying one piece of functionality will not impact another in the microservice architecture. For example, updating your customer management procedure will not inadvertently cause an error to occur within your order management processes.
Also, microservices lend themselves to smaller instances that can be more easily auto-scaled, meaning you can better leverage cloud technology to scale up and down your hardware usage based on traffic and order volume rather than buying larger servers that stand idle for several hours a day. Accordingly, you can scale up a microservice for high volume/traffic features while not having to scale up the less heavily trafficked applications, surgically targeting the functionality customers actually use.
Platform providers are embracing the microservices trend in different ways. Some are spinning up microservices marketplaces such as the aforementioned SAP YaaS solution. Others are structuring their platforms more modularly to make it easier to deploy the platform’s services in a microservices-oriented approach, as Magento has famously done with their M2 platform or SAP-Hybris OCC. Third party vendors are coming to the stage with their own microservices-driven approaches such as Mulesoft’s Anypoint solution, which allows rapid integration of enterprise systems that need to communicate in a fast and reliable manner. Top-tier systems integrators are now employing microservices in platform customizations to provide groundbreaking or unique features to enable B2B businesses to leverage their strengths to compete in the digital arena.
As solutions graduate from the current “platform in a box” approach to microservices-based approaches, vendors, designers and businesses can also step up and leverage serverless architectures such as AWS Lambda for further cost gains. Serverless architectures spin up on-the-fly hosting to respond to system requests rather than relying on always-on servers which cost money to run and monitor. Software designers write their software and upload it into the system and define a way of interacting with it. When a part of your enterprise needs that service, it simply makes a direct call to the service. A server is quickly brought online, the code is executed on that server and the result is provided. As a solution owner, you only pay for the time your code is executing – not the idle time – making it an ideal model for infrequently used features, new ideas and logic that is not core to your main business. Serverless architectures are gaining ground in the third party provider space and we believe the cost and reliability factors will drive consistent innovation in the coming years.
These emerging trends are ultimately serving key goals in the B2B space:
- Rapid Application: Businesses need to enact change in their digital channels faster than ever to compete. These technologies segment ecommerce operations into standalone functional endpoints that vary independently of each other and deploy small changes rapidly without sacrificing quality
- Benefit-Driven Scaling: B2B businesses need to be able to ensure predictable margins as the business and sales seasons evolve. Cloud deployment of microservices allows companies to employ auto-scaling based on the transaction and order load to align the cost of owning the solution to the revenue behind it
- On-Demand Resourcing: Everyone is looking for ways to eliminate the cost of idle time. Leveraging serverless concepts such as AWS Lambda to fire up services only as needed is an approach that can dramatically reduce infrastructure uptime and management costs
Microservices and serverless approaches allow businesses to blend the benefits of SaaS-based solutions (rapid scaling, ubiquitous infrastructure, per-use cost models) with the benefits of on-premises solutions (full change control, full ownership of the intellectual property). The most innovative and relevant ecommerce vendors and integrators are making significant investments in microservices and the serverless architectural approach. These techniques deserve careful and informed consideration as businesses continue to invest in their B2B enterprises.
