Microservices Enablers: DevOps and Identity

by Alex Laurien on July 30, 2019

To create competitive advantage within today’s disruptive economy, organizations need to not only adapt to customer demands, but they also need the agility to turn on a dime in response to the ever-changing landscape of customer requirements and provide superior and engaging customer experiences — whether it be online, in store, or across the entire omni-channel journey. In other words, within business, adaptability and agility are the most important attributes for long-term success. Further, due to the exponential increase in cyber-crime, leading organizations are embracing a zero trust model and therefore need to constantly adopt new security features and practices with agility. Of course, accomplishing all of this is easier said than done. Most organizations’ environments are built with monolithic legacy solutions that present significant challenges to adaptability and agility. Because of these challenges, leading organizations are moving to a microservices-based environment for their customer facing applications.

What are microservices?

Microservices are based on an important development method that focuses on building and deploying applications as groups of modular, composable services within an application. Most are built within a development model called DevOps. DevOps enables software development and deployment to run in a continuous cycle, allowing organizations to rollout new capabilities faster by reducing time to production. Developing microservices infrastructures with DevOps offers agility, adaptability, and flexibility unmatched by the traditional platform providers. Any organization utilizing microservices and DevOps can increase their agility to innovate and gain competitive advantage.

The glue in any successful microservices build for customer facing applications is identity. Identity and access management (IAM) determines which service performs which function on behalf of which user within which business process. With identity-enabled microservices, not only does every transaction get protected, but each microservice, as an identity itself, is managed and secured.

For example, today’s commerce applications are required to perform actions on behalf of customers across a variety of interactions in the customer journey, such as on a website or mobile app, through a call centre, in the physical store through beacons or IoT enabled technologies, or even through other services provided by third parties, — all within the same environment and often in the same buyer journey. For a consumer to experience frictionless interaction across these different channels, identities must be authenticated across all of the associated microservices. In other words, each microservice needs to know who the consumer is (authentication) and what they are allowed to do (authorization).

Because identity-enabled microservices increase agility, efficiency, resiliency, and revenue, they are fast-replacing large, complex legacy IAM solutions. They also lower project and operational risk, show faster time-to-value, provide flexibility for changing requirements, and more easily support mobile and IoT technologies.

Sponsorships Available

ForgeRock’s proven support for microservices architectures, and the new challenges they bring, accelerates and risk-mitigates investments. No other provider delivers the comprehensive capabilities to manage identity across this evolving landscape. And, no other provider offers an end-to-end solution that checks all the boxes when migrating existing legacy applications to a microservices architecture.

ForgeRock is designed to easily modernize your legacy identity. Read our latest whitepaper to learn how to transition from a monolithic, legacy environment to microservices.