Microservice Architecture, do you know what it is?

Hello dear architects across the globe, I'm kicking off this blog with simple but tricky question.

Do you really know what is a Microservice Architecture? Really? Awesome, but just in case you don't know or you would like to confirm your understanding, I will give you MY perspective about it.

Starting with basics, why Microservice, how does it differentiate from a Service?

There is much literature about building services, since early days when applications were built for purpose, all included, and it has evolved each time more granular.

Eventually people realized that have there was reusable components in those big applications, which we will call Monolith, and that by carving out that section of the code and making it a application on it's own could simplify maintenance and ensure consistency.

This was when we started seeing SOA - Service Oriented Applications - that were still quite large, but for much more specific tasks.

Let's see one example: Authentication mechanism

Back in monolith era, authentications were embedded in the application, each application had it's own solution to address logins, basically local accounts and specific data models, things that would not share information with other applications, do you remember when you had to access 20 different systems with 20 different passwords and each had a different policy?? arrggg I mean in the same company!!!

When we change that to a Service perspective, we decouple that capability from the main application, and it becomes and application on it's own, that is capable of interfacing in a standard way, much better no?

So what is the Microservice thing?

Simple, making a service by combining multiple much smaller services haha, well it's kind of true.

Back to the authenticating example, we could say that we have a authenticating service, that supports multiple methods, SAML, OAUTH, LDAP, etc, each one of this methods can be called a microservice within the superservice, it's one way of putting it.

The truth is that even in that case it can be made of smaller, for purpose, microservices, we need to find a balance, a microservice is not a function.

In the next post I will bring on example of how to create a event based microservice architecture for data movement.

Stay tuned, if you like it, lets know, if you disagree, let us know, well let us know in any case!!!