Chapter 2. Services

To understand the implications and trade-offs of moving to a new architecture, you need to understand how it differs from the old way of doing things, and how the new way will solve old problems. What are the essential differences between monolithic and microservice architectures? What are the new ways of thinking? And how do microservices solve the problems of enterprise software development?

A microservice is a unit of software development. The microservice architecture provides a mental model that simplifies the world at a useful level. The proposition of this book is that microservices are the closest thing yet to ideal software components. They’re perfectly sized artifacts for fine-grained deployment into production. They’re easily measured to ensure correct operation. The microservice attitude is the belief that these three aspects of the architecture deliver a fast, practical, efficient way to create business value with software. Let’s dig into the details to see how this works in practice.

2.1. Defining microservices

2.2. Case study: The digital edition of a newspaper

2.3. Microservice architectures

2.4. Diagrams for microservices

2.5. The microservice dependency tree

2.6. Monolithic projects vs. microservice projects

2.7. The unit of software

2.8. Requirements to messages to services

2.9. Microservice architecture diagrams

2.10. Microservices are software components

2.11. The internal structure of a microservice

2.12. Summary