Microservices

We are seeing an uptick in adoption of microservices as a technique for distributed system design, both in Thoughtworks and in the wider community. Frameworks such as Dropwizard and practices like declarative provisioning point to a maturing of the technologies and tools. Avoiding the usual monolithic approach and being sympathetic to the need to replace parts of systems individually has important positive implications for the total cost of ownership of systems. We see this as having greatest impact in the mid-to-long term, specifically with respect to the two-to-five year rewrite cycle.

Microservices, often deployed out-of-container or using an embedded HTTP server, are a move away from traditional large technical services. This approach trades benefits such as maintainability for additional operational complexity. These drawbacks are typically addressed using infrastructure automation and continuous deployment techniques. On balance, microservices are an effective way of managing technical debt and handling different scaling characteristics especially when deployed in a service oriented architecture built around business capabilities.