Last week I attended SAP Hybris’s America’s Summit in Fort Lauderdale. One thing has become clear over the past few months: SAP Hybris is an early adopter of an architecture called “Microservices. ” Their corporate branding of the architecture is named SAP Hybris as a Service (informally referred to as “YaaS. “)

I spent some time with both Stefan Schmidt, whose job title is “SVP, Hybris as a Service, ” and who describes YaaS as “SAP Hybris’s new baby, ” and Moritz Zimmermann, SVP of Pre-Sales & Industries (and a co-founder of hybris prior to SAP’s acquisition of the firm), working to understand the principles of the technology.

First, A Few Words About The Event

Before I go into more details on the technology, I want to say a couple of things about the event. Most importantly, I was quite surprised to find out just how many industries SAP Hybris touches. I tend to think of eCommerce providers purely in terms of retail but it turns out Digital Commerce is a big deal in B2B environments as well. In fact, some of YaaS’ biggest proponents came from outside the retail industry, ranging from commercial bakeries to pharmaceuticals. I suppose I should have known this, but I live in the world of retail, apparently to a fault.

The sessions and lunch round tables were informative and interesting and I was struck once again at the generational shift happening across enterprises. Boomers really are ceding the floor to Gen X and Millennials. At our luncheon round table, the only other Boomer present (besides me), was quiet, and most questions and comments came from younger folks. Truly, I think we’ve only just begun thinking about this enterprise generational change, and I don’t think we’ve absorbed the full implications of it yet. We’re so busy chasing the customer we haven’t looked much in the mirrors of our enterprises to see the changes happening there.

Still, that’s a story for another day.

Now, On To Microservices

No sooner did I come to some level of clarity around Cloud and SaaS, when I had to stretch my brain a bit more to absorb Microservices. To be fair, SAP Hybris has been telling us about the shift for some time now, but it didn’t start hitting me on the head until I got to the conference.

Mr. Zimmermann was kind enough to send me a link to an article that might help the reader if I am unclear. You can access it here, or you can read what Wikipedia has to say here, but I’m going to attempt to give you the CliffsNotes version.

How Does Microservices Work?

Traditional software tends to be modular, but ultimately monolithic. There are a lot of dependencies between modules, and even though various tools and techniques have been deployed to reduce those dependencies, they remain present enough to make upgrades and even on-demand hardware expansion tricky.

Microservice-based architecture is different. The parts and pieces are small enough that in concept, a service can be changed without having major impact on other services. Also, the use of Microservices can improve a system’s scalability, primarily because each service is doing very few things and is isolated from other services.

According to the blog Mr. Zimmermann sent me, Walmart Canada’s re-platforming to a Microservices architecture in 2012 directly resulted in a significant business uplift through improved conversions, mobile response times, and no downtime on Black Friday or Boxing Day.

Why? Microservices are loosely coupled, and so they don’t necessarily have to reside on the same computer. This allows an IT shop to use less expensive hardware and add hardware for services that are going to be more heavily used in peak periods. In other words, a company can find the best balance between the size and volume of computer resources for the lowest possible cost of ownership.

What Does This Mean And What Are The Watch-outs?

On the face of it, profound conclusions can be drawn from a migration to this kind of architecture. Upgrades can happen almost continuously, with one Microservice completely isolated (or abstracted, as geeks would say) from others. Theoretically, developers can work in small, autonomous teams, and one group doesn’t really need to know what another group is doing.

I confess that to me, this aspect of Microservices needs to evolve. Where some might see flexibility and efficiency, I see potential for redundancy and duplication of effort. I do think there’s a maturity that will allow for some kind of identification and cataloging of the various services that are developed by different internal and external teams. Somehow it seems to be this is the price we always must pay for scale or scope. In a conversation after the event, SAP Hybris executives agreed that they are putting a governance mode in place ; of course, the challenge is finding the balance between over-control and chaos.

The other “watch-out ” for me doesn’t have much to do with SAP Hybris, but with the term Microservices itself. Reading its entry on Wikipedia reminds me of reading a similar entry on Cloud Computing a couple of years ago. It’s vague. And anything vague is prone to be hyped.

For example, I’ve had a software vendor tell me “We’ve been Cloud-based since the 1980’s. ” Well, no he hasn’t. Hosted solutions and Cloud solutions are not the same, and true Cloud solutions didn’t exist in the 1980’s. In the same way, someone can say “We have employed a Microservices architecture for several years, ” when they really mean they’ve bolted modules together in a relatively seamless way. The difference is profound. One will deliver expected benefits, and the other will not.

Hopefully this is a useful and somewhat brief explanation of SAP Hybris’s new direction. I’m happy for the education, even though sometimes learning new paradigms make my brain hurt just a little bit.

I also appreciated the time SAP Hybris executives took to explain it to me, and enjoyed the conference immensely.