Microservices Guide
In short, the microservice architectural style 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.
A guide to material on martinfowler.com about microservices.
Late in 2013, hearing all the discussion in my circles about microservices, I became concerned that there was no clear definition of microservices (a fate that caused many problems for SOA). So I got together with my colleague James Lewis, who was one of the more experienced practitioners of this style. Together we wrote
We wrote the article to provide a firm definition for the microservices style, which we did by listing the common characteristics of microservice architectures that we saw in the field.
- 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
We also looked at common questions such as "how big is a microservice" and "what's the difference between microservices and Service-Oriented Architecture". The article catalyzed interest in microservices.
"Do we use it, do we not use it?
… and what on earth is it in the first place?"
In my short introductory talk (~25 minutes) I pick out the most important defining characteristics, compare microservices to monoliths, and outline the vital things to do before putting a first microservice system into production.
When should we use Microservices?
Any architectural style has trade-offs: strengths and weaknesses that we must evaluate according to the context that it's used. This is certainly the case with microservices. While it's a useful architecture - many, indeed most, situations would do better with a monolith.
Microservices provide benefits…
- Strong Module Boundaries: Microservices reinforce modular structure, which is particularly important for larger teams.
- Independent Deployment: Simple services are easier to deploy, and since they are autonomous, are less likely to cause system failures when they go wrong.
- Technology Diversity: With microservices you can mix multiple languages, development frameworks and data-storage technologies.
…but come with costs
- Distribution: Distributed systems are harder to program, since remote calls are slow and are always at risk of failure.
- Eventual Consistency: Maintaining strong consistency is extremely difficult for a distributed system, which means everyone has to manage eventual consistency.
- Operational Complexity: You need a mature operations team to manage lots of services, which are being redeployed regularly.
(from Microservice Trade-Offs)