Microservices: Up and Running

Chapter 3. Designing Microservices: The SEED(S) Process

If you recall, in Chapter 1, we stated that the main benefit of adopting microservices architecture is the ability to increase development speed without compromising safety of a system, at scale. This is an extremely important benefit for organizations tackling significantly complex problems. Note though that this certainly happens as a result of a conscious design, not by accident. In all but the simplest cases, it is impossible to iterate toward a successful microservices architecture without an effective and explicit, end-to-end system design.

In this chapter, we introduce an evolutionary process for designing microservices. This methodology was first formulated by one of the authors at a healthcare startup he cofounded, and later successfully implemented on numerous projects at other companies. The flexible approach has proven equally as effective for smaller organizations tackling complex problems; for eaxmple, a pioneering startup revolutionizing the vast healthcare industry and a large organization with thousands of software engineers across hundreds of teams.

Key Decision: Use a Standard Process for Service Design

Use a standard, repeatable process to achieve consistently high-quality, customer-centric design for the services in your system.

The microservices design system described in this chapter is a top-down, multistep methodology, and a collection of reusable processes, where each later step evolves from a ...