What are microservices?

Microservices are small, autonomous services that work together. Many organizations have found that by adopting fine-grained microservice architectures they can deliver software faster and embrace newer technologies. Microservices give us significantly more freedom to react and make different decisions, allowing us to respond faster to the inevitable change that impacts all of us. This lesson focuses on understanding microservices, the benefits they can bring, and their limitations.

What you'll learn—and how you can apply it

You'll learn what microservices are, understand their benefits, and explore how a microservice approach is different from other ways of decomposing your architecture. You'll also learn why microservices are not a silver bullet.

This lesson is for you because…

• You're a manager of a technical team whose organization is adopting a microservices approach, and you need to learn more.
• You're a software architect, programmer, developer, or team leader who is interested in learning more about microservices.
• Readers who have already embarked on the journey toward finer-grained architectures, whether for a greenfield application or as part of decomposing an existing, more monolithic system, will find plenty of practical advice to help. It will also help those who want to know what all the fuss is about—they can determine whether microservices are right for them.

Prerequisites

• Interest in the topic

Materials or downloads needed in advance

• None

This lesson is taken from Building Microservices by Sam Newman.

About the instructor

Sam Newman is a technologist at ThoughtWorks, where he currently splits his time between encouraging and sharing innovation globally and helping design and build their internal systems. He has worked with a variety of companies in multiple domains around the world, often with one foot in the developer world, and another in the IT operations space. If you asked him what he does, he'd say "I work with people to build better software systems." He has written articles, presented at conferences, and sporadically commits to open source projects.