Over the last couple of years, there has been renewed energy in the subject of service oriented architectures. The invention of term ‘micro services’ has warranted a immense interest in the subject of service oriented architectures.
Despite the initial contention on the difference between SOA and the already mature Component Based Software Engineering (CBSE), there is consensus that SOA improves the key attributes of software such as agility, cost to market, flexibility, inter-operability and many others. A service in SOA is now understood as an autonomous software unit that can be used programmatically across the network. Services can interact regardless of the underlying technologies for as long they expose their interfaces for use by other entities.
The size of a service — how much functionality can be bundled into a single service unit is a issue of design left to programmers and software architects. Of course services are compositional – i.e. two or more services may be combined into a new service in its own right. Practice and programmatic recommendations suggest that a service should bundle a business functionality. And SOA in is traditional form has been largely conceived to be applicable at the business level.
Microservice advocate a new way of building systems with more fine grained service units. Simple low-level core functionality can now be exposed as services for use in building high-level systems. A micro service may be as large as a function in a functional language or method in Object oriented Language. Microservices should not be equated to functions or methods because a service is an architectural unit.
Whereas micro services raise the level of flexibility, they increase the number of ‘moving’ parts – each service is autonomous, deployeable in an independent process. This comes with well known challenges of distributed computing. Obviously we have come to learn that in software architecture there is need for trade-offs. It may be very hard to optimize both flexibility and reliability.
The level of granuality and new usage scenarios for microservices, require new support tools for designing, monitoring, provisioning, management of microservice based systems.
To begin with there has been considerable attention to web services in the last couple of years since early 2000. For starters web service are no more that applications that are designed to be used across the web. Web services provide a program-to-program programming model where one service invokes another using web standards including the well known HTTP and XML. Here I outline the main benefits, some technical others business.
Overall, an enterprise that streamlines its operations into web services stands to benefit in many aspects.