What is a Microservices?
One way to understand microservices is to describe what they are not.
What is not a Microservice?
A typical but fairly big web application constitutes of a load balancer that will takes HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) (or HTTPS) requests and sends them to the appropriate host (Linux or otherwise). The server application’s configuration varies from company to company but a standard configuration consists of an Apache reverse proxy and a Tomcat server that runs the monolithic application. This application is directly connected to a Oracle (for example) database (maybe using JDBC in the case of Java) that stores the information. This database may also be connected with other databases such as a billing database, etc.
In this configuration, the code base of the application is monolithic: everybody is contributing to one code base that got deployed regularly.
One problem with this approach is that when a change that cause problems was introduced, it is difficult to diagnose because as many different updates are being introduced, it’s difficult to pin down the cause of the problem.
Same with the database which is just one machine taking every data. If it went down, everything went down with it.
A last problem is that the architecture is tightly coupled, or deeply interconnected.
What is a Microservice?
… the microservice architecture 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.
Microservices can also be thought of as an evolutionary response to the problems described above.
-
Separation of concerns
- Microservices encourage modularity, encapsulation in order to not have to deal with the coordination between each layers.
-
Scalability
- Horizontally scaling (with a correct approach)
- Workload partitioning
-
Virtualization & elasticity (microservices work better this way because…)
- We need to be able to automate operations as much as possible
- On demand provisioning
Microservices are an abstraction.
A service client will hit one of the service which will itself look for data in a database. At some point it is wise to front all this with a cache (Client) to accelerate things. To orchestrate the different steps, one need a Client Library that will check the cache first, then hit the service client if it can’t find the information in cache. The services also need to update the cache for the next time the information is needed. All this (Client Library, Cache Client, Service Client and Database) constitute the microservice from the client application’s perspective.