What are Microservices?
Microservices is an architectural style where an application is built as a collection of small, independently deployable services, each responsible for a specific business capability and communicating with other services through well-defined APIs.
How Does Microservices Work?
In a monolithic architecture, all functionality lives in a single codebase deployed as one unit. Microservices break this into smaller, loosely coupled services that can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently. Each microservice typically owns its own data store, runs in its own process, and communicates with others via HTTP/REST, gRPC, or message queues. This allows different teams to work on different services simultaneously, choose the best technology stack for each service, and deploy updates without affecting the entire application.
While microservices provide significant advantages in flexibility and scalability, they introduce complexity in areas like service discovery, distributed tracing, data consistency across services, and network reliability. Container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes are often used to manage microservices deployments. The architecture is best suited for large, complex applications with multiple development teams — smaller applications typically benefit more from a simpler monolithic approach.