Microservices

Microservices is a specialisation of an implementation approach for service-oriented architectures (SOA) used to build flexible, independently deployable software systems. Services in a microservice architecture (MSA) are processes that communicate with each other over a network in order to fulfill a goal. These services use technology-agnostic . The microservices approach is a first realisation of SOA that followed the introduction of DevOps and is becoming more popular for building continuously deployed systems.

In a microservices architecture, services should have a small granularity and the protocols should be lightweight. A central microservices property that appears in multiple definitions is that services should be independently deployable. The benefit of distributing different responsibilities of the system into different smaller services is that it enhances the cohesion and decreases the coupling. This makes it easier to change and add functions and qualities to the system at any time. It also allows the architecture of an individual service to emerge through continuous refactoring, and hence reduces the need for a big up-front design and allows for releasing software early and continuously.

There is no industry consensus yet regarding the properties of microservices, and an official definition is missing as well. Some of the defining characteristics that are frequently cited include:

A microservices-based architecture:

A workshop of software architects held near Venice in May 2011 used the term "microservice" to describe what the participants saw as a common architectural style that many of them had been recently exploring. In May 2012, the same group decided on "microservices" as the most appropriate name. James Lewis presented some of those ideas as a case study in March 2012 at 33rd Degree in Kraków in Microservices - Java, the Unix Way, as did Fred George about the same time. Adrian Cockcroft at Netflix, describing this approach as "fine grained SOA", pioneered the style at web scale, as did many of the others mentioned in this article - Joe Walnes, Dan North, Evan Bottcher and Graham Tackley.

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