A pattern language for microservices (#SFMicroservices)

When architecting an application, you need to choose between the traditional monolithic architecture, or the more fashionable microservices architecture consisting of many smaller services. But rather than blindly picking the familiar or the fashionable, it’s important to remember what Fred Books said almost 30 years ago: there are no silver bullets in software. Every architectural decision has both benefits and drawbacks. Whether the benefits of one approach outweigh the drawbacks greatly depends upon the context of your particular project. Moreover, even if you adopt the microservices architecture, you must still make numerous other design decisions, each with their own trade-offs. A software pattern is an ideal way of describing a solution to a problem in a given context along with its tradeoffs. In this presentation, we describe a pattern language for microservices. You will learn about patterns that will help you decide when and how to use microservices vs. a monolithic architecture. We will also describe patterns that solve various problems in a microservice architecture including inter-service communication, service registration and service discovery.