What Are Microservices?

Microservices are one of the latest trends in software design where multiple independent services communicate among themselves and have their own processes and resources. This approach differs from a typical client-server application design. The usual client-server application consists of one or more clients, a monolithic back-end which includes all domain data and logic, and an API which allows clients to access the back-end and its functionality.

In a microservices architecture, the described monolithic backend is instead substituted by a suite of distributed services. This design allows better separation of responsibilities, easier maintenance, greater flexibility in the choice of technologies for each service, and easier scalability and fault tolerance. At the same time, complex distributed systems have their set of challenges. They have a greater chance of having to deal with race conditions, and they are harder to debug as problems are not easily pinpointed to one single service, but are instead distributed through many. If an effort is not made to follow the best practices while building such a system, you may find yourself surrounded by fires that you do not know how to put out. Special care must be taken with the services’ payload contracts, as changes in one service may affect all its clients, and consequently all the back-end’s service suite. (more…)