Chapter 11. Microservices

It seems like no book on programming these days is complete without at least some mention of microservices. For fear that this book could be singled out for ridicule as a non-conformant publication, a chapter has been included on microservices.

Microservices are billed as the solution to the problems of monolithic applications. Likely every application you've dealt with has been a monolith: that is, the application has a single logical executable and is perhaps split into layers such as a user interface, a service or application layer, and a data store. In many applications these layers might be a web page, a server side application, and a database. Monoliths have their issues as I'm sure you've encountered.

Maintaining a monolithic application quickly becomes an exercise in limiting the impact of change. Frequently in such applications a change to one, seemingly isolated, corner of the application has an unintended effect on some other part...