What is Microservice?

Microservices, also known as microservice architecture, is an architectural style that structures an application as a collection of services that are:

• Loosely coupled 
• Independently deployable 
• Organized around business capabilities 
• Owned by a small team

The microservice architecture enables an organization to deliver large, complex applications rapidly, frequently, reliably, and sustainably—a necessity for competing and winning in today’s world.

The foundation of the microservices architecture is about developing a single application as a suite of small and independent services that are running in their own processes, developed, and deployed independently.

Example:

The online retail software application can be transformed into a microservices architecture by breaking the monolithic application layer into independent and business functionality-oriented services, where all the services take care of the inter-service communication and composition logic.

Figure: An online retail application built using a microservices architecture

Therefore, each microservice at the microservices layer offers a well-defined business capability (preferably with a small scope), which is designed, developed, deployed, and administrated independently.

The API gateway and management layer exposes the business functionalities as managed APIs; we have the option of segregating the gateway into independent per-API based run-times.

Since you now have a basic understanding of the microservices architecture, we can dive deep into the main characteristics of microservices.

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Happy Exploring!