This article draws on analyst commentary originally published at searchmicroservices.techtarget.com (2017). Analyst quotes and attributions are preserved from the source material.
Why Digital Transformation Is Pushing Teams Toward Microservices
Businesses under pressure to ship higher-quality applications faster and at lower cost are increasingly migrating away from large monolithic architectures. The destination is a modular, microservices-based approach in which independent components are built, deployed, and composed into complete systems. DevOps complements that shift by bringing consistency and automation to the build-and-deploy pipeline, enabling teams to release and refresh applications continuously.
These two trends — microservices and DevOps — are not independent movements. In practice, each accelerates the other. Smaller, independently deployable services demand automated pipelines, monitoring, and fast feedback loops. DevOps tooling, in turn, becomes far more valuable when services are granular enough to be updated without redeploying an entire application.
Mobile App Development as a Catalyst
Mobile development has been one of the clearest drivers for both microservices and DevOps adoption. Gartner analyst Jason Wong framed the relationship this way:
“Mobile app development has been a driver for both microservices and DevOps because the way that mobile apps are built requires more fine-grained services. These services are reusable and orchestrated to offer specific APIs that developers need. So, if you are building a mobile app and you have a workflow that might be calling data from a CRM system and another piece of data from an ERP system, you need different services on the back end to create an API that a mobile developer can easily utilize.”
— Jason Wong, Gartner analyst
The pace of change in the mobile ecosystem reinforces this need. Hardware refreshes, OS updates, and evolving app store policies all arrive on short cycles, making agility a baseline requirement rather than a competitive advantage.
“With the rate of change happening on the device side, with hardware and operating systems being released every few months, mobile developers need to be agile. They need to be able to do quick releases, and they also need to be able to monitor things in live production so they can make changes.”
— Jason Wong, Gartner
The App Store Constraint: How Mobile DevOps Differs from Web DevOps
DevOps for mobile apps is not a straightforward extension of web DevOps. The fundamental difference is distribution: web deployments push changes directly to servers, while mobile apps must pass through platform app stores and ultimately rely on end users to install updates. Wong highlighted this constraint explicitly:
“With mobile, you have to rely on the users to do some app updates. But there are tools that are emerging that allow the developer to do more dynamic over-the-air updates. There are different techniques and architectures in mobile app development that allow more dynamic updates without having to recompile code or without having to ship out a new app to the app stores.”
— Jason Wong, Gartner
Over-the-air (OTA) update mechanisms and feature-flagging approaches help teams work around this constraint, enabling at least partial updates to reach users without a full app store release cycle.
Composability: Building for Reuse, Not for One-Off Projects
Forrester Research principal analyst Michael Facemire identified composability as a defining characteristic of mature digital development organizations:
“Developers are required to compose from reusable components, rather than build the same big thing with many repeated parts. This holds true for both the front end and the back end, which leads mature development shops to build smaller, more granular microservices, often from traditional monolithic web services.”
— Michael Facemire, Forrester Research
Facemire also noted that despite high levels of discussion about DevOps and microservices, adoption varies significantly: most companies are doing some level of both, but the absence of a defined standard means many teams feel their efforts fall short.
Infrastructure Readiness: The Operations Dimension
Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, pointed out that microservices are well-matched to mobile development requirements — supporting multiple devices, different operating systems, and multiple software versions from a shared back-end service. He also stressed the operations side of the equation:
“It’s critical that operations staff be ready for the impact of these technologies on a company’s IT infrastructure and computing assets. Simply assuming that scores or hundreds or even thousands of employees using smartphone endpoints and apps won’t have a significant impact on an organization is a fool’s errand. DevOps efforts can help mitigate those effects.”
— Charles King, Pund-IT
Bridging the Semantic Divide Between Front-End and Back-End Teams
One underappreciated challenge in microservices adoption is the communication gap between the engineers who build back-end services and the developers who consume those services in front-end applications. Burley Kawasaki, then EVP of Products at mobile development platform provider Kony, described both the problem and a recommended solution:
“You can’t just build them as bespoke siloed projects — you have to start designing for reusability of microservices and components. A lot of focus is put on technology advances around microservices, but this requires a holistic approach to people, process and technology. You need to embrace DevOps practices and introduce new skill sets across your teams.”
— Burley Kawasaki, Kony
Kawasaki recommended the Backend for Frontend (BFF) pattern as a practical technique for closing this semantic divide. In a BFF architecture, a dedicated back-end layer is created specifically for each type of front-end client (mobile, web, third-party), exposing only the data shapes and APIs that front-end developers actually need. This reduces the impedance mismatch between teams without forcing either side to change its core working model.
Language Trends: Kotlin, Swift, and Modern Microservice Development
At the time of the original article (late 2017), Kotlin — developed by JetBrains and running on the Java Virtual Machine — was gaining rapid traction for Android development. Paul Kopacki, then CMO at mobile platform provider Realm, predicted that Kotlin would overtake Java as the dominant language for Android app development.
That prediction has broadly held: Google announced first-class Kotlin support for Android at Google I/O 2017, and Kotlin has continued to grow as a preferred choice for Android developers. Swift similarly consolidated its position in the iOS ecosystem. Both languages offer features — null safety, concise syntax, and strong type inference — that align well with the modular, contract-driven style of microservices development.
Tooling Landscape: What Teams Were Using
In the 2017 landscape, Gartner’s Wong identified Microsoft as a standout vendor in mobile DevOps tooling, citing its Xamarin cross-platform development environment along with several supporting products:
- Xamarin Test Cloud — automated test execution across real devices
- Visual Studio Mobile Center — build, test, distribute, and monitor mobile apps (later rebranded as App Center)
- Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) — CI/CD pipelines (later rebranded as Azure DevOps)
- HockeyApp — beta distribution and crash reporting (later merged into App Center)
Sam Guckenheimer, then product owner for VSTS at Microsoft, summarized the beta distribution challenge that all mobile DevOps pipelines must address:
“With mobile development, you have the different form factors and the app stores in the middle. You get your software onto the device via the app store, and that means you need an intermediate mechanism to get beta distribution to users.”
— Sam Guckenheimer, Microsoft
Key Takeaways for DevOps and Engineering Teams
- Microservices and DevOps reinforce each other. Fine-grained services require automated pipelines; automated pipelines deliver the most value when services are independently deployable.
- Mobile DevOps has unique constraints. App store distribution, OTA update limitations, and device fragmentation mean that mobile CI/CD pipelines require different thinking from server-side pipelines.
- Design for reuse from day one. Treating each mobile app as a bespoke project undercuts the composability that microservices make possible.
- Invest in cross-team tooling and patterns. The BFF pattern and shared API design standards help reduce friction between front-end and back-end teams.
- Prepare operations early. Large mobile user bases create real infrastructure load. DevOps practices — monitoring, automated scaling, incident response — should be part of the mobile strategy, not an afterthought.
As Pund-IT’s King observed, microservices and DevOps — like most sound engineering practices — are discussed far more often than they are fully implemented. The gap closes as organisations accumulate experience and recognise the compounding value of both approaches working together.