Microservices

Microservices can be considered a specialisation or ex- Architectures are symmetrical rather than hierarchi-
tension of service-oriented architectures (SOA) used cal (producer - consumer)
to build distributed software systems. As with SOA,
services in a microservice architecture (MSA)[1] are
A microservices-based architecture
processes that communicate with each other over a
network in order to fulll a goal. Also, like SOA, these
services use technology-agnostic protocols.[2][3][4] The lends itself to a continuous delivery software devel-
microservices architectural style is a rst realisation of opment process. A change to a small part of the
SOA that followed the introduction of DevOps and is be- application only requires one or a small number of
coming more popular for building continuously deployed services to be rebuilt and redeployed[2]
[5]
systems.
is distinct from a service-oriented architecture
Because of its focus on incremental and localized (SOA) in that the latter aims at integrating various
changes, Microservices tend to enable realization of ben- (business) applications whereas several microser-
ets and return on investment (ROI) more quickly than vices belong to one application only
investment in large traditional transformation programs.
In contrast to SOA, microservices respond to the ques- naturally enforces a modular structure[2]
tions of how big a service should be and how services
should communicate with each other. In a microservices
architecture, services should be small and the protocols 2 History
should be lightweight. The benet of distributing dier-
ent responsibilities of the system into dierent smaller
services is that it enhances the cohesion and decreases the Dr. Peter Rodgers introduced the term Micro-Web-
coupling. This makes it easier to change and add func- Services" during a presentation at Cloud Computing
tions and qualities to the system at any time.[6] It also al- Expo in 2005. On slide #4 of the conference presen-
lows the architecture of an individual service to emerge tation, he states that Software components are Micro-
through continuous refactoring,[7] and hence reduces the Web-Services. Juval Lwy had similar precursor ideas
need for a big up-front design and allows for releasing about classes being granular services, as the next evolu-
software early and continuously. tion of Microsoft architecture.[8][9][10] Services are com-
posed using Unix-like pipelines (the Web meets Unix =
Microservices and Service-oriented Architecture's are true loose-coupling). Services can call services (+mul-
service architectures with dierent goals. SOA is more tiple language run-times). Complex service-assemblies
focused on reusability and segregation whereas microser- are abstracted behind simple URI interface. Any service,
vices focus on replacing a large application(s), mostly sin- at any granularity, can be exposed. He described how
gle, with a system that can incrementally evolve and is a well-designed service platform applies the underlying
easier to manage. architectural principles of the Web and Web services to-
gether with Unix-like scheduling and pipelines to provide
radical exibility and improved simplicity by providing a
1 Details platform to apply service-oriented architecture through-
out your application environment.[11] The design, which
Properties of Microservices: originated in a research project at Hewlett Packard Labs,
aims to make code less brittle and to make large-scale,
complex software systems robust to change.[12] To make
The services are easy to replace
Micro-Web-Services work, one has to question and
Services are organized around capabilities, e.g., analyze the foundations of architectural styles (such as
user interface front-end, recommendation, logistics, SOA) and the role of messaging between software com-
billing, etc. ponents in order to arrive at a new general computing
abstraction.[13] In this case, one can think of resource-
Services can be implemented using dierent oriented computing (ROC) as a generalized form of the
programming languages, databases, hardware and Web abstraction. If in the Unix abstraction "everything
software environment, depending on what ts best is a le", in ROC, everything is a Micro-Web-Service.

1
2 4 CRITICISM

It can contain information, code or the results of com- moving responsibilities between services is more
putations so that a service can be either a consumer or dicult. It may involve communication be-
producer in a symmetrical and evolving architecture. tween dierent teams, rewriting the functionality
A workshop of software architects held near Venice in in another language or tting it into a dierent
May 2011 used the term microservice to describe what infrastructure[2]
the participants saw as a common architectural style that
the complexity of a monolithic application is only
many of them had been recently exploring. In May 2012,
shifted into the network, but persists:
the same group decided on microservices as the most
appropriate name. James Lewis presented some of those You can move it about but its still
ideas as a case study in March 2012 at 33rd Degree in there!
Krakw in Microservices - Java, the Unix Way, as did Robert Annett: Where is the
Fred George about the same time. Adrian Cockcroft at complexity?[20]
Netix, describing this approach as ne grained SOA,
pioneered the style at web scale, as did many of the others
mentioned in this article - Joe Walnes, Dan North, Evan
Bottcher and Graham Tackley.[14] Also, an application made up of any number of microser-
vices has to access its respective ecosystem which may
have unnecessary complexity.[21] This kind of complexity
can be reduced by standardizing the access mechanism.
3 Philosophy The Web as a system standardized the access mechanism
by retaining the same access mechanism between browser
The philosophy of the microservices architecture essen- and application resource over the last 20 years. Using the
tially equals to the Unix philosophy of Do one thing and number of Web pages indexed by Google it grew from
do it well. It is described as follows:[15][16][17] 26 million pages in 1998 to around 60 trillion individ-
ual pages by 2015 without the need to change its access
The services are small - ne-grained to perform a mechanism. The Web itself is an example that the com-
single function. plexity inherent in traditional monolithic software sys-
tems can be overcome.[22][23]
The organization culture should embrace automation
of deployment and testing. This eases the burden on
management and operations. 4.1 Nanoservices
The culture and design principles should embrace Too-ne-grained microservices have been criticized as
failure and faults, similar to anti-fragile systems. an anti-pattern, dubbed a nanoservice by Arnon Rotem-
Gal-Oz:
Each service is elastic, resilient, composable, mini-
mal, and complete.[17]
[A] nanoservice is an anti-pattern where
a service is too ne grained. [A] nanoser-
vice is a service whose overhead (commu-
4 Criticism nications, maintenance etc.) outweighs its
utility.[24][25][lower-alpha 1]
The microservices architecture is subject to criticism for
a number of issues: Problems include the code overhead (interface denition,
retries), runtime overhead (serialization/deserialization,
services form information barriers[18] network trac), and fragmented logic (useful functional-
ity not implemented in one place, instead requiring com-
the architecture introduces additional complexity bining many services).
and new problems to deal with, such as network
Proposed alternatives to nanoservices include:[25]
latency, message formats, load balancing and fault
tolerance,[19] ignoring one of these belongs to the
"fallacies of distributed computing" Package the functionality as a software library,
rather than a service.
testing and deployment are more complicated[19]
Combine the functionality with other functionalities,
inter-service calls over a network have a higher cost producing a more substantial, useful service.
in terms of network latency and message processing
time than in-process calls within a monolithic ser- Refactor the system, putting the functionality in
vice process[2] other services or redesigning the system.
 3

5 Users 6 Implementations
Known users of the Microservices architecture: Baratine is an open-source JVM framework for
building reactive applications. In Baratine, applica-
tions are composed of individual services. Within a
Akana service, only a single-thread is responsible for mutat-
ing data. Because of this data + thread abstraction,
Amazon - notably AWS API Gateway and Lambda Baratine solves the database access bottleneck that
plagues multi-threaded and multi-tier stacks. In ad-
Apprenda[26] dition, Baratines internals provide high availability,
recoverability, and thread context isolation to each
Bluemix service.[34]

Cloud Foundry[19] Docker

Enduro/X framework enables to build distributed

Google microservices based applications for C/C++/Go.

GE Predix Jolie,[35] The rst language for Microservices

The Guardian KumuluzEE[36] is an open-source microservice

framework for Java EE (Java Dukes Choice Award
winner 2015)
HP Helion Development Platform
Microsoft Service Fabric[37][38]
Interactive Intelligence
MicroService4Net,[39] an implementation that uses
Jelastic Windows services and self hosting web API in order
to create micro services easily (C#)
Microsoft Azure NetKernel is a uniform resource engine or operat-
ing system for developing, testing and running com-
Netix[27] (Netix receives nearly two-billion re- plex, distributed microservice architectures. It con-
quests each day resulting in roughly 20 billion in- sists of a pure-Java microkernel that embodies the
ternal API calls.) ROC abstraction, combined with a small core set of
libraries, to provide a minimal ROC system. The
Nirmata[28] system is modular and is extensible both with user
modules and with o-the-shelf ready to use dedi-
nearForm[29] cated function modules that can be installed from
NetKernels repositories. Modules are hot-swapable
Oracle[30] allowing for zero-downtime evolution of the soft-
ware conguration. Out of the box the core platform
Pivotal[31] is accompanied by a comprehensive set of modules
which provides a complete self-contained applica-
Red Hat Openshift[32] tion server, featuring: languages, transformation-
tools, integrated developer tools, operational mon-
Riot Games itoring/control etc.[40]

Nirmata
Salesforce
Red Hat Openshift[32] is a Platform as a Service
SAP Hybris - used for YaaS. See https://www.yaas. (PaaS) that allows developers to quickly develop,
io host, and scale applications in a cloud environment.

SoundCloud rupy Virtual Host PaaS with distributed DB for

Java.
Spotify[33]
Seneca Microservices Framework and Protocol
Uber Spring Cloud Spring Cloud provides tools for
Spring Boot developers to quickly build some of
Wix.com the common patterns in distributed systems (e.g.
4 9 REFERENCES

conguration management, service discovery, cir- [8] Lwy, Juval (October 2007). Every Class a WCF Ser-
cuit breakers, intelligent routing, micro-proxy, con- vice. Channel9, ARCast.TV.
trol bus, one-time tokens, global locks, leadership
[9] Lwy, Juval (2007). Programming WCF Services 1st Edi-
election, distributed sessions, cluster state). tion. pp. 543553.
Test tool for Microservices: Wilma[41][42] [10] Lwy, Juval (May 2009). Every Class As a Service. Mi-
crosoft TechEd Conference, SOA206. Archived from the
Vert.x[43]
original on 2010.

[11] Rodgers, Peter. Service-Oriented Development on

7 See also NetKernel- Patterns, Processes & Products to Reduce
System Complexity. CloudComputingExpo. SYS-CON
Media. Retrieved 19 August 2015.
Self-contained Systems
[12] Russell, Perry; Rodgers, Peter; Sellman, Royston (2004).
Conways law Architecture and Design of an XML Application Plat-
form. HP Technical Reports. p. 62. Retrieved 20 August
Fallacies of distributed computing 2015.
Service-oriented architecture (SOA) [13] Hitchens, Ron (Dec 2014). Swaine, Michael, ed. Your
Object Model Sucks. PragPub Magazine. Pragmatic
Representational state transfer (REST) Programmers: 15.
RISC, RISC vs CISC as analog debate [14] James Lewis and Martin Fowler. Microservices.
Unix philosophy [15] Lucas Krause. Microservices: Patterns and Applications.
ASIN B00VJ3NP4A.
Web-oriented architecture (WOA)
[16] Lucas Krause. Philosophy of Microservices?".
Cross-cutting concern
[17] Jim Bugwadia. Microservices: Five Architectural Con-
Serverless computing straints.
Openshift [18] Jan Stenberg (11 August 2014). Experiences from Fail-
ing with Microservices.

[19] Developing Microservices for PaaS with Spring and

8 Notes Cloud Foundry.

[1] Spelling and grammar corrected. [20] Robert Annett. Where is the complexity?".

[21] BRASS Building Resource Adaptive Software Systems.

U.S. Government. DARPA. April 7, 2015. Access
9 References to system components and the interfaces between clients
and their applications, however, are mediated via a num-
ber of often unrelated mechanisms, including informally
[1] Microservices: yesterday, today, and tomorrow (PDF).
documented application programming interfaces (APIs),
Retrieved 6 July 2016.
idiosyncratic foreign function interfaces, complex ill-
[2] Martin Fowler. Microservices. understood model denitions, or ad hoc data formats.
These mechanisms usually provide only partial and in-
[3] Newman, Sam. Building Microservices. O'Reilly Media. complete understanding of the semantics of the compo-
ISBN 978-1491950357. nents themselves. In the presence of such complexity, it is
not surprising that applications typically bake-in many as-
[4] Wol, Eberhard. Microservices: Flexible Software Archi- sumptions about the expected behavior of the ecosystem
tectures. ISBN 978-1523361250. they interact with.
[5] Balalaie, A.; Heydarnoori, A.; Jamshidi, P. (2016-05-01). [22] Alpert, Jesse; Hajaj, Nissan. We knew the web was big.
Microservices Architecture Enables DevOps: Migration Ocial Google Blog. Google.com. Retrieved 22 August
to a Cloud-Native Architecture. IEEE Software. 33 (3): 2015.
4252. doi:10.1109/MS.2016.64. ISSN 0740-7459.
[23] The Story. How search works. Google.com. Retrieved
[6] Oliver Wolf. Introduction into Microservices. 22 August 2015.
[7] Chen, Lianping; Ali Babar, Muhammad (2014). Towards [24] Services, Microservices, Nanoservices oh my!, Arnon
an Evidence-Based Understanding of Emergence of Archi- Rotem-Gal-Oz
tecture through Continuous Refactoring in Agile Software
Development. The 11th Working IEEE/IFIP Conference [25] Pratical SOA: 1.1: Nanoservices, Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz,
on Software Architecture(WICSA 2014). IEEE. 2010
 5

[26] How Enterprise PaaS can add Critical Value to Microser-

vices.

[27] Microservices (PDF).

[28] Microservices.

[29] NodeCrunch Tag Archives: microservices.

[30] Microservices and the Integration Platform.

[31] Let your developers move faster with composable ser-

vices.

[32] Develop, Host and Scale Apps in the Cloud.

[33] Schedule Thursday (3rd Dec.) - conference. goto-

con.com. Retrieved 2016-04-19.

[34] Baratine.

[35] http://www.jolie-lang.org/

[36] KumuluzEE.

[37] overview

[38] blog announcement

[39] http://www.codeproject.com/Tips/894355/
MicroService-Net-Create-Micro-Services-Easily-with

[40] Products > Platform. 1060 Research Ltd. Retrieved 12

October 2015.

[41] Wilma documentation

[42] Wilma source code

[43] Vertx.

10 Further reading
Armin Balalaie, Abbas Heydarnoori, Pooyan
Jamshidi, Migrating to Cloud-Native Architec-
tures Using Microservices: An Experience Report,
arXiv preprint arXiv:1507.08217

Armin Balalaie, Abbas Heydarnoori, Pooyan

Jamshidi, Microservices Architecture Enables De-
vOps: Migration to a Cloud-Native Architecture,
IEEE Software, May/June 2016.

Wijesuriya, Viraj Brian (2016-08-29) Microservice

Architecture, Lecture Notes, University of Colombo
School of Computing, Sri Lanka
6 11 TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES

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