Developing Reactive Microservices

Chapter 1. Introduction

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

Henry Ford (July 30, 1863 - April 7, 1947), founder of the Ford Motor Company

With microservices taking the software industry by storm, traditional enterprises are forced to rethink what they’ve been doing for almost two decades. It’s not the first time technology has shocked the well-oiled machine of software architecture to its core. We’ve seen design paradigms change over time and project management methodologies evolve. Old hands might see this as another wave that will gently find its way to the shore of daily business. But this time it looks like the influence is far bigger than anything we’ve seen before. And the interesting part is that microservices aren’t new.

Talking about compartmentalization and introducing modules belongs to the core skills of architects. Our industry has learned how to couple services and build them around organizational capabilities. The really new part in microservices-based architectures is the way truly independent services are distributed and connected back together. Building an individual service is easy. Building a system out of many is the real challenge because it introduces us to the problem space of distributed systems. This is a major difference from classical, centralized infrastructures. As a result, there are very few concepts from the old world that still fit into a modern architecture.

Today’s Challenges for Enterprises

In the ...