"SOA" entries

4 reasons why microservices resonate

Microservices optimize evolutionary change at a granular level.

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We just finished the first O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference and the overwhelming most popular topic was microservices. Why all the hype about an architectural style?

Microservices are the first post-DevOps revolution architecture.

The DevOps revolution highlighted how much inadvertent friction an outdated operations mindset can cause, starting the move towards automating away manual tasks. By automating chores like machine provisioning and deployments, it suddenly became cheap to make changes that used to be expensive. Some architects properly viewed this new capability as a super power, and built architectures that fully embraced the operational aspects of their design. The Microservice architectural style prioritizes operational concerns as one of the key aspects of the architecture.

Microservice architectures borrow a design aesthetic from Domain Driven Design called the Bounded Context. A bounded context encapsulates all internal details of that domain and has explicit integration points with other bounded contexts. Microservice architectures reify the logical DDD bounded context into physical architecture. For example, it is common in microservice architectures for services that must persist data to own their database: members of the service team handle provisioning, backups, schema, migration, etc. In other words, in microservice architectures, the bounded context is also a physical context. But that also means that this service implementation isn’t coupled to any other team’s implementation, clearing the path for independent evolution. I recently published some writing about the recent realization that architecture is abstract until operationalized. In other words, until you have deployed an architecture and upgraded parts of it, you don’t fully understand it.

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