What, Why, When: Microservices

A Straight-Up Guide

One-Liner

Microservice is a style of architecture that composes applications out of remotely accessible components.

Also, “microservice” refers to an instance of such a component.

Put another way, an application is considered to be in this style if it is comprised of microservices.

Simple Idea, Seems Complex

Microservice architecture is one of those ideas that is actually simple but can spiral into complexity as soon as you open your mouth to explain it.

We’re going to avoid that here. This is a straight-up guide, designed to cleave to the essential of the thing.

If I were going to put a name on the idea, I might call it “remotely decoupled application architecture”.

We’re going to cut through to the essence of the what, the why and the when you should use microservices.

The reality is that all modern web apps are comprised of a variety of services and microservice really is one end of the spectrum that is attempting to harness the most benefit from the architecture via remote decoupling and internal service simplification.