An end of the year survey by NGINX revealed that the proportion of apps being built with microservices in 2020 has increased by 20% compared to the year before. This shows that modern application environments are becoming essential, especially as around 50% of the respondents said they were using microservices in some or all apps

The survey also stated that containers are becoming a very popular app with 34% of participants indicating that they were using containers in their production environment. In comparison, only 15% of respondents used serverless and 7% service discovery.

These findings then prove Gartner’s prediction that 75% of global organizations will have containerized applications in production environments by 2022. There is an important shift to microservices‑based apps, where companies want to build platforms with better resilience and quicker deployment abilities.

Moreover, the research revealed that 14% of participants are looking to adopt service meshes in the next year, which is 50% more than nowadays.

Thus, it also stated that the public cloud remains the most used infrastructure option for modern app tools as well as Infrastructure-as-a-Service, serverless computing, and private Platform-as-a-Service. There is a progressive shift away from on-premises load balancers towards more software-based load balancers.

Yet, there are still challenges. Indeed, 50% of respondents are concerned about security while 39% about reliability and availability, and 34% about performance.

As a result, it is likely that API gateway management will increase up to 22% as predicted in 2021. Therefore, organizations will start to invest more in solutions like WAF and service delivery.

As microservices management keeps on growing, there is going to be more investment in open-source container orchestrators and API management tools. Associated technologies will then also be increasing.