Why Software Must Evolve: From Monolithic to Microservices and Beyond

What changes have software undergone in the past decade?

While hardware performance has increased a hundredfold, software has expanded its language ecosystem from Basic, Fortran, and C to Java, C#, Python, PHP and hundreds of other languages, alongside emerging technologies such as XaaS, open source, containers, and services.

The main trajectory of software development is to continuously improve development efficiency and developer experience, lower entry barriers, and boost overall software productivity, which in turn fuels open‑source growth and a scale‑out model that contrasts with hardware’s scale‑up approach.

What is embedded software and where is it heading?

Originally, embedded software was tightly coupled with hardware and shipped together with devices. After Linux was ported to embedded environments, the distinction blurred; technically, embedded software now shares the same development stack as PC and server software.

Because the technical gap is minimal, modern embedded development can adopt internet‑software practices such as SDK+IDE for automatic code generation, though adoption remains low due to misconceptions about performance and resource consumption.

Why break the current monolithic software model?

Monolithic software resembles a massive stone: any change—adding a feature or fixing a bug—requires recompiling, testing, and redeploying the entire system, leading to long wait times and tangled dependencies across multiple development groups.

This tangled structure causes extensive waiting for verification and defect fixes, which is a primary source of developer frustration.

From componentization to service‑orientation: what’s the difference?

Componentization provides basic reuse by packaging common functionality into binary components, but it introduces heavy integration overhead and locks products into specific platforms.

Service‑orientation decouples functionality, allowing consumers to use services without managing internal implementations, reducing coupling, and enabling easier replacement and cross‑platform migration.

What are containers and microservices?

Containers are lightweight runtime environments that have existed for decades but gained popularity with Docker, which bundles development and deployment tooling, lowering the barrier to entry and boosting productivity.

Microservices combine the benefits of componentization and service‑orientation: they break applications into small, independently deployable services that can be scaled, updated, and tested in isolation, improving fault isolation and supporting DevOps practices, though they require sophisticated automation for coordination.

Huawei’s wireless tools department is already working on related initiatives.