Re:The Death of Microservice Madness in 2018
by Izkata on Monday January 22, 2018 @08:58PM
(#16210226)
> I'm gonna just be honest here and say that I don't really know the difference between "microservices" and "service-oriented architecture" except for the notion that "microservices" implies breaking up your services before they get too big and hairy, which kind of seems obvious.
The impression I get - and this could be totally wrong - is that the difference is how the services relate to each other.
In this post's example, 5 of the 6 microservices look like something that would be exposed to the user in some way. I would call this a microservice architecture; they're networked together in a way where no one thing orchestrates the others. They likely all touch the same data storage, but the overall structure is mostly flat.
In a service-oriented architecture, there'd be a tree-like or graph-like hierarchy. To an end user, it would look monolithic, but the monolith would, behind the scenes, delegate to the "user-facing" services such as Upload and Download. Upload and Download would then use the Transcode service as appropriate. But the important part is that this would all be one way: Transcode isn't allowed to contact Upload or Download, just return the result to whatever called it.
The impression I get - and this could be totally wrong - is that the difference is how the services relate to each other.
In this post's example, 5 of the 6 microservices look like something that would be exposed to the user in some way. I would call this a microservice architecture; they're networked together in a way where no one thing orchestrates the others. They likely all touch the same data storage, but the overall structure is mostly flat.
In a service-oriented architecture, there'd be a tree-like or graph-like hierarchy. To an end user, it would look monolithic, but the monolith would, behind the scenes, delegate to the "user-facing" services such as Upload and Download. Upload and Download would then use the Transcode service as appropriate. But the important part is that this would all be one way: Transcode isn't allowed to contact Upload or Download, just return the result to whatever called it.