Microservice Architecture

What is microservice architecture?

Microservices architecture is an organizational software design approach in which large applications are built as a group of modular components, or microservices, that can be developed, tested, and deployed independently. Each microservice is a self-contained unit that performs specific functions and communicates with other microservices through well-defined interfaces, usually APIs.

In a microservices architecture, each service can be owned by a small, self-contained team.  This allows teams not only to work on different microservices simultaneously, but also to deploy and scale microservices independently making the overall system more resilient and easier to maintain.

The modular approach to software design enables:

• greater flexibility and scalability, as individual services can be deployed independently,
• code reuse, as breaking a large application into smaller, focused services make it easier to understand and maintain the codebase, 
• different parts of the application to be developed and maintained by different teams, using different technologies and languages, as needed,

However, a service oriented architecture can also be more complex to design and manage than a monolithic one, as it may require more coordination between services that communicate through infrastructure. Debugging and troubleshooting a distributed system can also be more difficult. Therefore, this approach to the software development is generally better suited for large, complex applications that are expected to evolve over time.