Defining and standardizing microservice architecture
Microservices break down application development into independent functional components. One of our guests, Emily Jiang of IBM, defines a microservice as “a piece of software that can do one thing and do one thing very well.” For building good microservice architecture, she recommends following the 12 Factor App methodology. The 12 principles in this methodology were created in an effort to guide development and help standardize Java microservices. Emily identifies some of them, such as:
Another guest, Roberto Cortez of Red Hat, agrees with her definition, and also adds, “I believe that every team or company has their own definition of microservices. So when people sometimes say, ‘Whoa, how big should a microservice be? Should it be 10k bytes or this many lines of code?’ It doesn't really matter, right? What actually matters is what you do with it in your own organization.”
The monolith to microservices “lift and shift” can be tricky
Roberto makes it clear that moving from a monolithic architecture to microservices is more than just a technical change for organizations. “If you require microservices, it’s not only about the architectural design patterns that you have to implement, or all the technical aspects of microservices, it’s also a cultural change.” Instead of everyone working together on one thing, you’ll have teams working on separate pieces. They’ll need to communicate differently. “It's going to be a huge cultural impact for the company if your team is not used to working in that direction. And I've seen multiple companies fail, not because the technical aspect was not there, but because the company didn't have the culture to adopt that kind of methodology.”
Moving into MicroProfile
Eclipse MicroProfile is a collaboration of several open source projects, like Red Hat, which aims for more effective delivery of microservices to enterprise Java applications. Emily Jiang defines MicroProfile as the established programming model for microservices and cloud native applications, which includes APIs to achieve quality services for your application. She adds, “That's why MicroProfile is a great framework for doing microservices, because they can manage the quality services for you.”
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