For traditional and internet companies with extensive technology assets, building a cloud-native platform is a process of hybrid evolution. Heterogeneous environments will persist across application, infrastructure, and deployment architectures. Early cloud-native practices that use only containers, Kubernetes (K8s), and microservices without service mesh support pose significant challenges for internal technology teams.
Forrester proposes the Future Fit technology strategy model. This model helps companies quickly restructure their business and capabilities, adjust operations, and meet future customer and employee needs with adaptability, creativity, and resilience. Platforms, practices, and partners are key factors in building this technology strategy. Cloud-native platforms, which include areas such as containers, microservices, and service mesh, will become the core engine for building modern, future-fit enterprises.
In typically hybrid and heterogeneous environments, Chinese enterprises face diverse cloud-native adoption paths and multi-dimensional challenges. They must effectively combine service mesh technology with microservices to truly unlock the benefits of cloud-native technology.
Quantified benefits
The risk-adjusted quantified benefits in present value (PV) include the following:
Eliminating the need to refactor monolithic applications increased the efficiency of migrating applications to the cloud for unified administration by over 90%.
Using a service mesh allows applications to be migrated to the cloud and managed uniformly with other cloud-native applications, without refactoring them into distributed microservices. The migration work was reduced from 25 people working for eight months to 5 people working for two to four months. Over three years, 10 monolithic applications were migrated directly to the cloud for unified administration without refactoring. This overall efficiency improvement resulted in ¥9.41 million in benefits for the company.
Adopting the service mesh improved developer efficiency by reducing three application iterations per year related to underlying component upgrades.
The company's cloud-native applications required at least three iterations per year because of underlying component upgrades. Applications using the service mesh achieved decoupling of middleware and business logic, which reduced the cost of technical transformation for business development to zero. This efficiency improvement over three years resulted in ¥1.05 million in quantified benefits for the company.
Efficiency gains in O&M security management and canary releases led to over ¥500,000 in cost savings.
After adopting the service mesh, infrastructure-related failures dropped from at least two per year to zero. This saved O&M engineers time on fault localization and repair. The service mesh also improved the efficiency of configuring security O&M rules, reducing the workload from two to three days per week to two to three hours. This benefit resulted in over ¥500,000 in cost savings for the company over three years.
Replacing legacy systems resulted in over ¥600,000 in cost savings.
Because the service mesh allows interaction between different types of applications, the maintenance of the original Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) product could be partially replaced by the service mesh once most applications were managed by SOFAStack. This resulted in over ¥600,000 in cost savings for the company.
Non-quantified benefits
Important non-quantified benefits include the following:
Unified monitoring capabilities
SOFAStack provides unified monitoring for both traditional technology stacks and cloud-native environments. This improves the efficiency of issue identification.
Precise fault localization
For cloud-native environments with microservice-based applications, the service mesh provides powerful traffic control capabilities. It helps manage data center risks and enables precise fault localization through call tracing.
Reduced resource consumption for incident reviews
For financial enterprises with strict regulatory requirements, a full review is required after any incident to ensure future system availability and prevent similar issues. However, these reviews consume significant time from developers and O&M engineers, which impacts productivity.
Improved component capabilities
The performance of public, business, and security components all improved after being decoupled as microservices.
For more information, see The Forrester Total Economic Impact of SOFA Mesh - 202109.