Characteristics of microservices
The microservices definition discussed earlier in this chapter is arbitrary. Evangelists and practitioners have strong, but sometimes, different opinions on microservices. There is no single, concrete, and universally accepted definition for microservices. However, all successful microservices implementations exhibit a number of common characteristics. Therefore, it is important to understand these characteristics rather than sticking to theoretical definitions. Some of the common characteristics are detailed in this section.
Services are first class citizens
In the microservices world, services are first class citizens. Microservices expose service endpoints as APIs and abstract all their realization details. The internal implementation logic, architecture, and technologies, including programming language, database, quality of services mechanisms, and more, are completely hidden behind the service API.
Moreover, in the microservices architecture, there is no...