Have you heard the microservices buzzword thrown around a lot lately?

Yes, people have come up with the terms such as headless ERP.

So, is Microservices architecture relevant for you if you don’t sell software for a living?

Well, yes and no.

The whole concept of microservices is not new.

Before Microservices became a thing, there were several other concepts such as services-oriented architecture or EAI.

They all have similar design principles.

Sure you could argue that we didn’t have deployment containers back then.

So technically, they were not microservices.

We also didn’t have CI/CD and DevOps technologies that would allow the continuous upgrade of software as with SaaS platforms.

And yes, that is right.

The world of containers has changed how services are created and deployed.

The world of cloud requires much leaner services that are composable and scalable blocks than creating a thick service, harder to scale.

So would ERP ever be Microservices based?

Again, yes and no.

If you are looking at it purely from how the software is developed, then yes, maybe microservices would make sense.

So how about companies that are using ERP, in conjunction with writing custom software for their customer experience?

In this architecture, the microservices layer would sit on top of ERP and other financial or operational applications that might be feeding data to the service layer.

The service layer would provide the elastic that the architecture would need to ensure that financial applications don’t get hammered with the uncontrolled load.

There headless commerce layer, industry4.0, and supply chain data sources will all feed to the service layer.

Or they all might feed to the headless commerce layer.

Which will in turn feed to the content management layer.

This sounds complicated, right?

Yes, and that’s probably the reason why microservices architecture is perhaps reserved for the enterprise companies or the ones that are in the software development business.

The SMB retailers and manufacturers would need this only if it helps them enable a differentiated customer experience.

What do you think of the microservices architecture?

Would the world of ERP change with the advancement in microservices architecture?

#microservices #eCommerce #ERP