Microservices

Microservice architecture or simply microservices, is a distinctive method of developing software applications as a suite of independently deployable, small, self-contained programs, modular services in which each service runs a unique process and communicates through a well-defined, lightweight mechanism to serve a business goal.

Microservices architecture structures an application as a collection of loosely coupled services.

The benefit of decomposing an application into different smaller services is that it improves modularity and makes the application easier to understand, develop, test, and more resilient to architecture erosion.

It also parallelizes development by enabling development teams to develop, deploy and scale their respective services independently.

There is no standard andformal definition of microservices yet!

Characteristics

Services in a microservice architecture are independently deployable.

The services are easy to replace.

Services can be implemented using different programming languages, databases, hardware and software environment, depending on what fits best.