Diego Pacheco Tech blog

Normalmente eu nao blog em português, mas hoje quero compartilhar um programa que participei recentemente. Programa gravado com o Inacio da South System sobre Arquitetura de Software, mais especificamente falando de Microservices, SOA, Shared-Libs e bem como os problemas e as soluções. Microservices estão em baixa nos dias de hoje. Porém muitas vezes não entendemos por que estamos usando microservices e nem por que estamos parando de usa-los. Muito difícil conversar sobre SOA e microservices sem falar de shared-libs e o impacto nessas arquiteturas. Nessa conversa você ira entender mais os problemas desse landscape bem como muitas alternativas para editar esses problemas. Entao bora la ver esse video! 

It's funny but some time ago reactive was used a word that relates to bad things all that changed now if you are reactive you are awesome. Besides the huge hype about reactive microservices lets rewind a little bit and remember what microservices are about. Microservices are about isolation and fine-grained functionality. Microservices are a specific and modern flavor of SOA . It's possible to have others flavors of microservices too.  Microservices are not for free and following this architectural approach you gain some issues, most of people really  don't know what are this issues. Which is very dangerous adopt something you don't know the issues :-)

There are lots of people talking about microservices. IMHO I don`t most of people get it - Microservices are about Isolation, Idependence and Anti-Fragility and this are principles most of frameworks did not have. So the botton line is in the end of the day if you dont have this you are just doing OLD SOA ou even worst you might just be doing WebServices. Netflix get it. All the components are build guided by core architecture principles and anti-fragility is on the heart of this components.

This is not a new discussion is very old. I remember back into the SOA days - always was something like REST VS SOAP. SOAP is dead and REST own but now is something different. To be clear - I think REST is the only thing you should use when we talk about External consumers. Like and external API thats would be accessed by a mobile or website. There are other scenarios like INTERNAL consumers. For this case you can consider using a NATIVE driver instead of REST. So whats is a NATIVE driver? Is just code into a language you are using - so could be Java, Scala, Clojure, Ruby, Go, whatever it does not matter. This idea is similar to the JDBC java driver you have java code to access the database.  So thats the real question when i have internal consumers for my microservices, should they talk to each other tought REST or native driver? It really depends because both approach have PROS and CONS like everything in life - there are trade offs - but i consider REST in general a ...

A long time ago a remember when agile on the early days was something driven by developers - pretty much by XP practitioners. Don`t get me wrong agile is about the customer, and its about making better software and of course mgmt is part of software but agile is not only about mgmt. I`m really not sure when - maybe after PMI embracing Scrum and Jira rises as the ultimate agile tool(not for me :-) ) But today more and more a see less and less engineers going away from agile.  Maybe because they thing agile is about process, tools(jira) and practices(scrum) and thats a manager thing. To be clear agile is way more than scrum. I`m way more into Lean and Kanban than Scrum but i can`t deny i`m seeing this more and more on the market.

Microservices are about ISOLATION . I need point out some different aspects here, keep in mind the word: Microservices is compose by 2 words, micro, thats where you got the isolation, minimal business unit, great marriage with REST in sense of RESOURCE and several other things i mention on previous post. There is another word call: service. This is where SOA come to play, there is lots of people talking BAD about SOA now a days, but they dont realize MSA is SOA.  Service is not a web service, so that word has more meaningful than people imagine. SOA is about principles , its about great foundations that enable Service Orientation. That`s is an Architecture but its also a way to think also called SO(Service Oriented). Microservices make a lot of sense if you are coming down from a monolith its very DDD like if you pay attention.

One of the real game changing benefits of SOA / MSA(Microservices Architecture) is flexibility. Flexibility give you power todo things as you wish, in order to have flexibility you need have decoupled things but hold on a second, in a service oriented world everything is done via a contract and services are coupled to this contracts. How could you still have flexibility if the contract changes you need rebuild all consumers and deal with the changes? Even worst than that - whats makes SOA different from webservices or procedures calls on the data base? (remember soa/msa is not about technology is about principles and design/arch.)

Working as a consultant many times i raise the bar of the role architecture in great software. As solution engineers we often talk about software architecture. When we are working with SOA / MSA (Microservices architecture) we need realize that there is more than one architecture. You could and most likely will have a middleware or container or bus or platform you do your business work but each *thing* needs to have its own architecture. For SOA/MSA the citizen of first class are Services, so basically you work with Services and you just "see" services, in the end of the day what matters is raise the level of abstraction and leverage from that in business perspective.

Amazon, twitter, linked in, eBay all this guys was dong webservices and evolve to soa and now they are at the next step the micro services era. This is one of the most hot software architecture topics on the it industry right now. But how completely now new this is?  I would say for maybe your surprise, not so much. Microservices are SOA. IF microservices are soa whats the difference in the end of the day, well i gonna try to explain it here in this post. Short Answer: Is all about isolation, is all about have independence. Hold ON: SOA was about that as well :-) Yes thats true, i`m not saying soa is invalid of something like that, SOA was more focused on some architecture principles and big architecture concerns but MSA(Microservices Architecture) focus more on operational capabilities.