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Microservices tenets

Agile approach to service development and deployment

  • Special Issue Paper
  • Published:
Computer Science - Research and Development

Abstract

Some microservices proponents claim that microservices form a new architectural style; in contrast, advocates of service-oriented architecture (SOA) argue that microservices merely are an implementation approach to SOA. This overview and vision paper first reviews popular introductions to microservices to identify microservices tenets. It then compares two microservices definitions and contrasts them with SOA principles and patterns. This analysis confirms that microservices indeed can be seen as a development- and deployment-level variant of SOA; such microservices implementations have the potential to overcome the deficiencies of earlier approaches to SOA realizations by employing modern software engineering paradigms and Web technologies such as domain-driven design, RESTful HTTP, IDEAL cloud application architectures, polyglot persistence, lightweight containers, a continuous DevOps approach to service delivery, and comprehensive but lean fault management. However, these paradigms and technologies also cause a number of additional design choices to be made and create new options for many “distribution classics” type of architectural decisions. As a result, the cognitive load for (micro-)services architects increases, as well as the design, testing and maintenance efforts that are required to benefit from an adoption of microservices. To initiate and frame the buildup of architectural knowledge supporting microservices projects, this paper compiles related practitioner questions; it also derives research topics from these questions. The paper concludes with a summarizing position statement: microservices constitute one particular implementation approach to SOA (service development and deployment).

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Notes

  1. This workshop was organized and primarily attended by practicing architects and software architecture thought leaders (rather than service-oriented computing researchers or microservices advocates).

  2. Articles that are rooted in actual project experience, but not peer-reviewed and published in academic venues were considered to be relevant and eligible for the literature review.

  3. The rationale for the selection of these two particular sources is a) the generality and breadth of the discussions and b) their popularity.

  4. Note that the scenario viewpoint has a retrospective role in Kruchten [14], but is used differently here, representing the entire business perspective; the process viewpoint also covers integration and remoting concerns according to Kruchten [14].

  5. The above list is (roughly) ordered by phases in the software lifecycle; individual questions progress from abstract to concrete and from a more logical to a more physical view. The questions address practitioners with microservices experience (“you”) so that they can be used in interviews and assessments, e.g., when evaluating offerings w.r.t. maturity and vision.

  6. This topic was for instance discussed in an ICWE 2016 WS-REST (un-)panel; the session notes are available at https://github.com/apiacademy/WSREST2016/wiki/Olaf-Zimmermann.

  7. Assembly is a deliberately neutral term; related terms that were established earlier include service composition, business process management, and even workflow management.

  8. Progress has been made in recent years; functionally rich (but sometimes cumbersome to use) various proprietary and open source package managers and integration servers are now available for programming languages and platforms such as Java, Ruby, Scala, and Linux.

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Jonas Biedermann, Simon Brown, Wolfgang Giersche, Gregor Hohpe, Hansjörg Huser, Oliver Kopp, Frank Leymann, Daniel Lübke, Cesare Pautasso, Gerald Reif, Mirko Stocker, the attendees of the SEI SATURN 2015 workshop on microservices as well as the anonymous peer reviewers of and paper presentation/poster session attendees at SummerSoC 2016 for inspiring discussions and/or thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this article. The author would also like to thank James Lewis for the constructive and inspiring discussion following his ICWE 2016 keynote, which confirmed the SOA vs. microservices positioning presented in this paper, which had been accepted for publication previously.

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  1. University of Applied Sciences of Eastern Switzerland (HSR FHO), Oberseestrasse 10, 8640, Rapperswil, Switzerland

    Olaf Zimmermann

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Correspondence to Olaf Zimmermann.

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Zimmermann, O. Microservices tenets. Comput Sci Res Dev 32, 301–310 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00450-016-0337-0

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