Martin Fowler is a brilliant technologist. Needless to say. This post is going to be a recap of some of my tweets on the subject of micro-services (or “microservices” as I see commonly being written). I would have quoted a bunch of other people instead, had I seen many. But that wasn’t the case, so I’ve got to quote myself then.
The first article I read about micro-services was on InfoQ.
SOA, just like EA, is value tainted brand: “@adrianco: Infoq: Microservices and SOA < the "nothing new here" view http://t.co/fpoEaiP4Au
— Isaka Traore (@itraor) March 23, 2014
Some time later, I saw a blog post by Martin Fowler’s article on the same subject. Then I immediately thought, as is typically the case, that the developer community was going to go crazy about the concept. I had the following reaction.
I love tech, soon we will have Microservice Consulting Firms, Books, Training Centers, Ninjas, Gurus, … http://t.co/pSprHWInt0
— Isaka Traore (@itraor) July 6, 2014
Naturally I value the thoughts and the content of the article. But I was merely concerned that many would jump straight in and make a total mess of a rather valuable insight. The topic gained popularity quite quickly, faster than I had expected though I couldn’t say I was surprised either. Reputed analysts picked up on this.
Technology Forecast: Rethinking integration: Microservices: The resurgence of SOA principles: PwC http://t.co/CzYqy1dhJv
— Isaka Traore (@itraor) September 24, 2014
Time going by didn’t assuage my concerns, rather, I was only getting more and more confirmations. I thought that perhaps nobody is going to adjust perceptions and expectations until disaster stories would abound. I tweeted my thought on that.
I've heard so much about microservice in so many inopportune contexts that I expect it to reach SOA's bad press faster than SOA did.
— Isaka Traore (@itraor) January 30, 2015
Soon enough, people started posting thoughts on what was going on.
A false choice: Microservices or monoliths — Medium
What @simonbrown has been (rightly) saying in 2-3 word tweets. https://t.co/QOl7h5tAXi
— Isaka Traore (@itraor) March 20, 2015
And, to keep this relatively short, here we are, somewhat full circle, with Martin Fowler inviting for some sanity. Martin opens his latest blog post
As I hear stories about teams using a microservices architecture, I’ve noticed a common pattern.
Almost all the successful microservice stories have started with a monolith that got too big and was broken up
Almost all the cases where I’ve heard of a system that was built as a microservice system from scratch, it has ended up in serious trouble.
Read Martin’s blog post here: Monolith First, by Fowler