Predicting Microservices ROI

Welcome to this series to cover various aspects of microservice migration. The first Article here is “How to Predict Microservices ROIs” .

Introduction

Nowadays, there is a trend to migrate enterprise applications from monolithic to Microservices. The biggest business drivers for the same are

IT Modernization
Digital Transformation
Growth & Expansion

Generally, we adopt a stranger pattern, where we migrate piece by piece to Microservices. Generally, we create a migration roadmap with side by side approach. The most difficult part of this migration proposal is to justify the cost of migration. ROI can be calculated by prediction cost and benefit analysis.

Apply Samling Technique to predict cost and benefits-

Let’s take a sample of Future Microservice X, which will replace the monolithic Module Y .. let’s collect the following data

Measuring Benefits

How many bugs have been reported for that module in the last 6 months or 1 year? You can assume that microservice will minimize that cost and all the effort and cost put in bugs will be future savings with Microservices.
What was the average time to deliver a story point/feature? WIth Microservice this should increase and you can calculate the delta.
What was the developer productivity?
Is there any feature missed due to stability? What would have been the business impact of that feature? With microservice, you will introduce agility and you can assume that chances of missing a feature will be negligible.
Has the current system missed some customers due to scalability issues ( You can predict, how many customers has been missed and what could have been a business impact)
How much average time and effort a typical deployment take? With Microservice all the deployments will be automated and you can predict the

Estimating Cost