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This is a guest repost written by Andrew Harmel-Law on his real world experiences with Microservices. The original article can be found here.
It’s reached the point where it’s even a cliche to state “there’s a lot written about Microservices these days.” But despite this, here’s another post on the topic. Why does the internet need another? Please bear with me…
We’re doing Microservices. We’re doing it based on a mash-up of some “Netflix Cloud” (as it seems to becoming known - we just call it “Archaius / Hystrix”), a gloop of Codahale Metrics, a splash of Spring Boot, and a lot of Camel, gluing everything together. We’ve even found time to make a bit of Open Source ourselves - archaius-spring-adapter - and also contribute some stuff back.
Lets be clear; when I say we’re “doing Microservices”, I mean we’ve got some running; today; under load; in our Production environment. And they’re running nicely. We’ve also got a lot more coming down the dev-pipe.
All the time we’ve been crafting these we’ve been doing our homework. We’ve followed the great debate, some contributions of which came from within Capgemini itself, and other less-high-profile contributions from our very own manager. It’s been clear for a while that, while there is a lot of heat and light generated in this debate, there is also a lot of valid inputs that we should be bearing in mind.
Despite this, the Microservices architectural style is still definitely in the honeymoon period, which translates personally into the following: whenever I see a new post on the topic from a Developer I respect my heart sinks a little as I open it and read… Have they discovered the fatal flaw in all of this that everyone else has so far missed? Have they put their finger on the unique aspect that mean 99% of us will never realise the benefits of this new approach and that we’re all off on a wild goose chase? Have they proven that Netflix really are unicorns and that the rest of us are just dreaming?
Despite all this we’re persisting. Despite always questioning every decision we make in this area far more than we normally would, Microservices still feel right to us for a whole host of reasons. In the rest of this post I hope I’ll be able to point out some of the subtleties which might have eluded you as you’ve researched and fiddled, and also, I’ve aimed to highlight some of the old “givens” which might not be “givens” any more.
The Good
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