Microservices

Microservices are specific services that solve or enable a single business functionality. They tend to be small, and communicate with one another via APIs. They are independent and don’t share data or a platform, for example, so developers can easily update one without disturbing another.

What Microservices Means

Microservices are tiny independent components that communicate with each other through well-defined APIs. Each microservice is autonomous and can be clustered, managed and scaled without affecting the operation of the other components. Each microservice solves a specific problem.

An architecture using microservices allows applications to scale and develop faster and easier, enabling them to foster innovation and accelerate the time to market of new features.

Microservices constitute a modular architecture designed specifically to support software development based on the decomposition into smaller units.

Microservices are more adaptable than monoliths, as components can be updated or modified independently from one another. However, they still require a significant investment of time to implement such changes.

Microservices Definition

Microservices are a container-based architectural approach to building applications. Each application is made up of multiple, small and independent components. This allows services to scale or update independently without affecting performance or functionality of others in the application.

Benefits of Microservices

Business Agility

Microservices focus on targeted functionalities, thus reducing development, testing and deployment cycles. This leads to a faster time to market and delivery of new capabilites.

Efficiency

Development teams can focus on individual microservices without affecting or having to wait for other teams to deliver projects.

Manageability

As independent small components, microservices are more manageable, and their implementation or maintenance does not impact or disrupt other areas.

Resiliency

The separation of components carries an advantage in case of failure. Should a bug occur, it’s possible to isolate the single components, test solutions, and release the updated service without affecting the rest of the application.

Use of polyglot development languages

Managing multiple parts of the software separately allows them to be programmed with different languages. This allows services to be managed using the best available technologies, only where they are actually needed. This also results in considerable independence for individual development teams.

Monolithic architecture vs. microservice architecture

In monolithic architectures, software is conceived as a single entity, a single project, developed with a single programming language, and distributed in a single package. In fact, all processes are tightly interconnected and run as a single service. Every single change involves the redistribution of the entire application.

With a microservice-based architecture, an application is built from independent components that run each application process as a service. These services communicate through a well-defined interface using APIs. Services are built for business functions, and each microservice performs only one function – a company’s business needs will define the scope and number of microservices needed. Because they run independently, each service can be updated, deployed, and scaled to meet the demand for specific functions of an application.

Microservices vs PBCs

Both microservices and PBCs fall under the Composable Commerce paradigm, as they are independent, headless, loosely coupled, and scalable. However, they are not exaclty the same thing. If microservices are granular units tightly scoped to perform one single task, PBCs are a bundled collection of features targeting specific business capabilities. A PBC-built application is focused on the business value of its components.

View Packaged Business Capabilities definition