Microservices

Contents

• Characteristics of a Microservice Architecture
• Componentization via Services
• Organized around Business Capabilities
• Products not Projects
• Smart endpoints and dumb pipes
• Decentralized Governance
• Decentralized Data Management
• Infrastructure Automation
• Design for failure
• Evolutionary Design
• Are Microservices the Future?

Sidebars

• How big is a microservice?
• Microservices and SOA
• Many languages, many options
• Battle-tested standards and enforced standards
• Make it easy to do the right thing
• The circuit breaker and production ready code
• Synchronous calls considered harmful

“Microservices” – yet another new term on the crowded streets of software architecture. Although our natural inclination is to pass such things by with a contemptuous glance, this bit of terminology describes a style of software systems that we are finding more and more appealing. We’ve seen many projects use this style in the last few years, and results so far have been positive, so much so that for many of our colleagues this is becoming the default style for building enterprise applications. Sadly, however, there’s not much information that outlines what the microservice style is and how to do it.

In short, the microservice architectural style [1] is an approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms, often an HTTP resource API. These services are built around business capabilities and independently deployable by fully automated deployment machinery. There is a bare minimum of centralized management of these services, which may be written in different programming languages and use different data storage technologies.

Full article: martinfowler.com/articles/microservices