Microservices Architecture

Problems with monolith and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) lead to new paradigm. It was clear this new thing has to be modular and should deals with simple API, not complicated ESB based implementations.

Then in 2011, the term “Microservices” emerged and in 2014 Martin Flower and James Lewis published their “Microservices” article. This article became very popular standardize Microservices architecture.

There are 9 major characteristics of Microservices architecture as per them.

1. Componentization via Services

Modular design is always a good idea. We always need our code to be modular so update it requires a small code change in a well-defined part.

Components are the parts that together compose the software. In other words, a modular software is a software that has more than one component and each component is responsible for a specific aspect of the software.

There are basically two methods to implement molecularity in software.

1. Libraries -called directly withing the process.
2. Services -called by our of process mechanism (e.g REST API)

In Microservices we prefer using services for the componentization. Libraries can be used inside the service for common components.