What Makes a Good Microservice?

The microservice architectural style is almost a decade old!

The term was widely popularized with the article “microservices” from Fowler in 2014. It emerged as a consequence of cloud platform and using the cloud as a distributed operating system.

Many companies abandoned monolith around this time and paved the way towards microservice: Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, etc. Here’s a serie from Airbnb: Building Services at Airbnb

Over the next years (or decade), the industry learned the pitfalls of microservices, when the style makes senses and when it’s overengineered. Ultimately, it’s about balancing complexity.

There are cases when you don’t need microservices. DHH’s “majestic monolith” is valid counter-argument.

Ultimately, the question shouldn’t be “What makes a good microservice?”, but “What makes a good microservices architecture?” Microservices, per definition, don’t come alone.