Microservices – Getting to Know the Buzzword

The world of information technology today is witnessing a revolution influenced by cloud computing. Agile, inexpensive, scalable infrastructure which is completely self-serviced and pay-per-use has a critical part to play in optimizing the operational efficiency and time-to-market for software applications enabling all major industries. With the changing nature of underlying hardware and operational strategies, many companies find it challenging to meet competitive business requirements of delivering applications or application features which are highly scalable, highly available, and continuously evolving by nature.

The agility of this change has also compelled solution architects and software developers to constantly rethink their approach of architecting a software solution. Often, a new architecture model is inspired by learnings from the past. Microservices-driven architecture is one such example which is inspired by Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). The idea behind Microservices-based architecture is heavily based on componentization, abstraction, and object-oriented design, which is not new to a software engineer.

In a traditional application, this factorization is achieved by using classes and interfaces defined in shared libraries accessed across multiple tiers of the application. The cloud revolution encourages developers to distribute their application logic across services to better cater to changing business demands such as faster delivery of capabilities, increased reach to customers across geographies, and improved resource utilization.