an architecture paradigm that tries to identify the smallest possible independent component that can run as a service.
— DevOps for the Modern Enterprise, Mirco Hering (as “microservices”)
Microservice
Also answers to microservices
2 of our books define this term — and their definitions are worth reading side by side.
Software today consists of a number of small software components that interact with one another, passing messages back and forth and delegating tasks to each other. Today’s best practices suggest architecting software as a number of small, independent, service-providing components, each of which accomplishes a piece of the total functionality and which delegate work to each other—microservices. One advantage of microservices is that each service can be scaled independently—in other words, if a particular function does a high volume of processing, you can add hardware power to it without also adding hardware power to the rest of the system, resulting in cost efficiencies. That is one advantage among many for microservices.
— War and Peace and IT: Glossary, Mark Schwartz
See also abstraction layer · access layer · application programming interface (API) · cloud · cloud native application · compilers
Filed under Architecture & Systems