What are microservices?

For many years now, we have been finding better ways to build systems. We have been learning from what has come before, adopting new technologies, and observing how a new wave of technology companies operate in different ways to create IT systems that help make both their customers and their own developers happier.

Eric Evans’s book Domain-Driven Design (Addison-Wesley) helped us understand the importance of representing the real world in our code, and showed us better ways to model our systems. The concept of continuous delivery showed how we can more effectively and efficiently get our software into production, instilling in us the idea that we should treat every check-in as a release candidate. Our understanding of how the Web works has led us to develop better ways of having machines talk to other machines. Alistair Cockburn’s concept of hexagonal architecture guided us away from layered architectures where business logic could hide. Virtualization platforms allowed us to provision and resize our machines at will, with infrastructure automation giving us a way to handle these machines at scale. Some large, successful organizations like Amazon and Google espoused the view of small teams owning the full lifecycle of their services. And, more recently, Netflix has shared with us ways of building antifragile systems at a scale that would have been hard to comprehend just 10 years ago.

Domain-driven design. Continuous delivery. On-demand virtualization. ...