Talking Microservices

 Had cause to talk the concept recently,  in InfoQ, here is a somewhat technical look at the concept and its uses and details. Most of the details and useful links at the clickthrough.

Reviewing the Microservices Architecture: Impacts, Operational Complexity, and Alternatives  by Wesley Reisz, Yan Cui in InfoQ

Key Takeaways

Although we can find case studies about microservices migrations, there are still a lot of companies in the industry that haven’t touched the microservices strategy yet.

The current microservices approaches are more complex than they used to be. We build more complex systems, with a more complex architecture, so we have a more complex landscape and a deeper learning curve as consequence.

Monitoring and tracing microservices are some of the biggest challenges, besides its complexity.

The event-driven architecture is a great way to build microservices, especially in terms of communication between different services.

Wes Reisz moderated an InfoQ Live roundtable on the impact of microservices, dealing with operational complexity, and alternatives to the microservices model. The participants were Leif Beaton (NGINX senior solutions architect), Yan Cui (independent AWS and serverless consultant), and Nicky Wrightson (Skyscanner principal engineer).

Peter Rodgers first introduced the term "micro-web-services" during a presentation at the 2005 Web Services Edge Conference, going against the conventional thinking at the time. The SOAP service-oriented architecture peaked in 2005 and Rodgers was arguing for RESTful services. He described in his presentation how a well-designed micro-web-services platform combines the underlying architectural principles of the web and REST services in Unix-like scheduling and pipelines to provide flexibility and simplicity in service-oriented architectures.

After six years of innovation and thought about this problem, a May 2011 workshop for software architects coined the term "microservice" to describe what participants were seeing and employing. By the next spring, the community embraced "microservices" to describe this architectural style.   ... '