Microservices

In computing, microservices is a software architecture design pattern, in which complex applications are composed of small, independent processes communicating with each other using language-agnostic APIs. These services are small, highly decoupled and focus on doing a small task.

Details

Properties of the Microservices architecture:

• The services are easy to replace
• Services are organized around capabilities, e.g. user interface frontend, recommendation, logistics, billing, etc.
• A microservices-based architecture
  • lends itself to a continuous delivery software development process.
  • is distinct from a Service-oriented architecture (SOA) in that the latter aims at integrating various (business) applications whereas several microservices belong to one application only

Criticism

The microservices architecture is subject to criticism for a number of issues:

• services form information barriers
• the architecture introduces additional complexity and new problems to deal with, such as network latency, message formats, load balancing and fault tolerance, ignoring one of these belongs to the "Fallacies of Distributed Computing"
• testing and deployment are seriously more complex tasks
• the complexity of a monolithic application is only shifted into the network, but persists:

  You can move it about but it's still there!

  — Robert Annett: Where is the complexity?

Languages

• Jolie

Users

Known users of the Microservices architecture:

• Bluemix
• Amazon
• Netflix
• SoundCloud
• The Guardian

See other

• Conway's law
• Fallacies of Distributed Computing
• Service-oriented architecture
• Representational state transfer
• Web-oriented architecture