Micro Services

Owned by Computer Science Department
Last updated: Jul 18, 2023
2 min read

Microservices architecture is an architectural style that structures an application as a collection of small, autonomous, and loosely coupled services. Each of these services corresponds to a specific business functionality and can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently.

 

Here's a breakdown of the key characteristics of a microservices architecture:

  1. Single Responsibility: Each microservice focuses on a single responsibility and implements a specific business capability.

  2. Independence: Microservices are independent entities. Each microservice can be developed, deployed, updated, and scaled independently of the others.

  3. Distributed Development: Because each microservice is separate, they can be developed concurrently by different teams.

  4. Decentralized Data Management: Each microservice has its own dedicated database or datastore to ensure decoupling at the data layer.

  5. Fault Isolation: A failure in one service does not impact the functioning of other services.

  6. Infrastructure Automation: Microservices often leverage containerization and orchestration tools for automating deployment, scaling, and recovery tasks.

  7. Communication: Microservices communicate with each other through well-defined APIs and protocols, typically HTTP/REST with JSON or gRPC with Protobuf.

  8. Observability: With the complex interaction between microservices, it's crucial to have robust monitoring, logging, and tracing capabilities for observability and debugging.

Microservices architecture offers numerous benefits such as agility, scalability, resilience, and easier deployment processes. It enables organizations to adapt to changing technology and business requirements.

However, it also introduces additional complexity. The distributed nature of the architecture means that developers need to handle inter-service communication, data consistency, distributed system failure, and network latency. It's also necessary to have mature DevOps practices and infrastructure automation in place due to the high number of different services that need to be managed.

Thus, it's not a one-size-fits-all solution and should be adopted only after careful consideration of these factors and the organization's ability to address these challenges.