We’re seeing a massive shift in how companies build their software. More and more, companies are building—or are rapidly transitioning—their applications to a microservice architecture. The monolithic application is giving way to the rise of microservices. With an application segmented into dozens (or hundreds!) of microservices, monitoring and consolidated logging become imperative.

For the past few years, microservices have been the talk of the town, with numerous success stories across big business and start-ups alike. However, with the rise of containerization in the enterprise, we are starting to hear about this term again as the new Holy Grail, the next step in the evolution of our applications. In this article we’ll look at some of the main driving forces behind why many developers now see microservices as the the future of application development.

A recent study showed that 55% of businesses believe they have less than a year to innovate before they start to suffer financially and lose market share. In a world where the digital consumer expects a personalized experience and real-time access to information on any device of their choosing, 12 months might be too long. Implementing microservices as a business strategy enables companies to keep pace with customer demand in the never-ending competition to gain market share.

More and more companies are eager to move their operations to the cloud. Yet, there’s quite a bit of ambiguity on what moving to the cloud actually means. Is your business running in the cloud while you host your database on another platform or while you rely on a third-party service to handle your payments? That’s a good start for moving to the cloud, but there are many other aspects to consider when building a cloud native infrastructure.