From the course: Serverless and Microservices for AWS

What is a microservice? - Amazon Web Services (AWS) Tutorial

From the course: Serverless and Microservices for AWS

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What is a microservice?

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- In this chapter we'll talk about microservices. And in particular, serverless microservices and how they differ from other available architectures. The typical architectural approaches to application building follow a continuum from monolithic architecture to service-oriented architecture, SOA, to microservices, and finally, serverless microservices. Monolithic architectures are the traditional approach. They are built as a single code base and may run on a single hardware platform. Changes to monolithic applications may require building and deploying the entire application, even for small or specific changes or fixes. There are some positives about monoliths, though. Development can be simpler. Cross cutting concerns like security, logging and data transfer may be easier to handle. Actual performance may be higher as well. The trade-offs can be significant, though. Over time, the code base can become complex. Refactoring to address this may be a huge undertaking, as it likely touches all parts of the code base. It's also difficult to move to new technologies. Perhaps the biggest downside is the lack of agility, particularly when multiple teams are working on the same app. Service-oriented architectures move from monolithic approaches by creating distributed application components that communicate via messaging middleware technology. Services in SOA can be entire subsystems. Microservices are characterized by services that are generally single-purpose. Communications among microservices typically use REST, or messaging queuing approaches. Serverless microservices architectures are microservices deployed in a cloud environment using serverless technologies for compute. Communications among the microservices are the same as server-based microservice deployments, REST, events or messages.

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