Microservices, a New Paradigm, a New Mindset

Microservice architecture is a new paradigm, which means it is not possible to completely understand with an Object Oriented (OO) mindset. It doesn’t mean OO is not required, what it means is that we need additional knowledge.

I like to think a Microservice not just as a single entity, but as a network, because rarely a single Microservice will cover a complete use case end to end, usually you will need several Microservices to process a single request. There are many ways to achieve this. Let’s first review a wrong approach — Say we have three Microservices, and they communicate to each other using a synchronous request/response approach:

Under this approach, Microservice 1 will be idle until Microservices 2 and 3 finish processing.

If we implement same functionality using Objects instead of services, we will get exactly the same behavior: we need to wait for Objects 2 and 3 to finish before we can get a returned value from Object 1.

In Object Oriented Programming (OOP) this is cool, and there is nothing wrong with it, but in Microservices this is a performance issue.