Microservices as a self sufficient concept

Over the past few years microservices became a very hot topic in development communities. More and more people talk about the approach and attempt to build large software systems according to various patterns published by enthusiasts. The buzz words (and buzz concepts) are a big driving force in software development, which in a lot of cases results in failures, as people simply don’t research and learn the subject deep enough to be able to make informative decisions. I think one of the concepts suffering from such high level approach is distributed systems development, which some are trying by going with microservices model.

I am greatly interested in software architecture for distributed enterprise-level systems and I believe that microservices concept has not only been greatly misunderstood by many, but also is flawed in the way it is presented – as a self sufficient “architecture”. However, microservices is merely an implementation approach and without proper fundamentals will not magically lead you to success. What are those fundamentals you may ask? Well, read on – this is not going to be very long, even though each of the fundamentals is a very large subject.