Microservices
An architecture where a system is built from small, separately deployed services, each owning its data and talking to the others over the network.
Teams can release their service independently and scale it alone. In exchange every call can fail or be slow, data is spread across databases, and a business process that used to be one transaction becomes a saga. You need tracing, retries, versioned contracts and someone on call for each piece. The payoff appears with several teams working in parallel, rarely before.
Related terms
- Modular monolith: One deployable application split inside into modules with clear boundaries, each owning its data and using the others only through defined interfaces.
- Database per service: Each service owns its data and no other service reads its tables directly; the others go through its API or its events.
- Saga pattern: A business process across several services run as a chain of local transactions, with a compensating action to undo each step if a later one fails.
- Conway’s law: Systems end up shaped like the communication structure of the organization that builds them.
