Enterprise Architecture (EA) functions to assist enterprises in building structural foundations to match proposed business strategies. It captures the vision of an enterprise by integrating its dimensions to contextualize transformation strategies, organizational structures, business capabilities, data pools, IT applications, and all technology objects. Every business unit of an enterprise is subject to change, and each change may have significant consequences throughout organizational domains.

An enterprise that wants to adopt the cloud across all the business units must have a mature and well-formed understanding of its Enterprise Architecture and a clear view of components therein.

Many enterprises claim that The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) is a waterfall model that does not meet their expectations for modern Enterprise Architecture. Instead they adopt a Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) methodology to design their enterprises.¹

To note, the three pillars of Enterprise Architecture are: Alignment, Insight, and Quality. 

Microservices Governance is a methodology or approach that establishes policies, standards, and best practices for the adoption of Microservices to enable an enterprise agile IT environment.

In the Microservices world, developers now have the freedom and capability to experiment with new languages, patterns, frameworks, data stores, and other innovative aspects of IT development. This can result in the operations team feeling a level of discomfort when confronting the new experimentations done by the developers. Various views exist in regard to Microservices architecture having no governance, or a thin governance compared to service-oriented architecture (SOA).

Today, enterprises are adopting technologies like analytics, mobility, social media, IoT and smart embedded devices to change customer relationships, internal processes, and value propositions. Industry leaders recognize the need for innovation, agility and quick turnaround time in their digital enterprise business and increased customer demand. This leads to the adoption of Microservices and reduction in the dependency on monolithic applications, as they slow down the addition of incremental improvements to applications and underlying platforms in response to market demands. Microservices acts as building blocks for building modern distributed enterprise systems and become one of the enablers in the digital transformation journey.