Microservices

Microservices

  • a software design architecture that breaks apart monolithic systems
  • applications are built as collections of loosely coupled services
  • data moves between microservices using “dumb pipes” such as an event broker and/or a lightweight protocol like REST

Advantages

  • teams can develop, maintain, and deploy each microservice independently
  • scalability, you can scale them separately; the cost of scaling is comparatively less than the monolithic architecture
  • faster development cycles - easier deployment and debugging
  • speed up your CI/CD pipeline against big monolithic apps
  • it’s easier to maintain and debug a lightweight microservice than a complex application
  • isolated services have a better failure tolerance

Disadvantages

  • communication between microservices can mean poorer performance, as sending messages back and forth comes with a certain overhead
  • microservice has all the associated complexities of the distributed system
  • complex testing over a distributed environment; while unit testing may be easier with microservices, integration testing is not
  • up-front costs may be higher with microservices

Sources