Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz believes the view that something is either a monolith or a microservice is nonsense. He also believes that more and more implementations which claim to be microservices will not live up to all of the principles. However, he does not discount the need…
Three years ago Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz discussed the then relatively new topic of microservices and how they related to SOA, as well as raising a question about nanoservices. In a recent article Arnon continues to believe that microservices are perhaps not the panacea some would believe and it may be a marketing ploy: For me, one of the telltale signs the whole microservices hoopla is a consultant marketing ploy is the whole microservices vs. monoliths thing, as if there is nothing between. On the other hand it seems that these days everything that happens to be delivered at an endpoint and runs in its own processes is called a microservices.
Though he may have a point, clearly others do see a spectrum of approaches and not necessarily binary. For instance, Gartner and others talking about miniservices , which are by one defintion: A miniservice is true SOA (not unlike a microservice) that can include numerous microservices. It’s a level above microservices. It’s an external approach to services, while microservices focus on internal scale, ultimately improving external capabilities.
And of course there’s the other miniservice-like concept, the so-called microlith. But back to Arnon, he is worried about the inference that if you aren’t developing a microservice then your service is somehow bad, or a monolith: […] if every independently deployed component is a microservice, and needs to have all the traits of a micro service, life gets really complicated. These traits, separation and autonomy, requires work, hard work to avoid API coupling, transactional coupling, temporal coupling, internal structures coupling and so on and so forth. Instead we get to the point that everything is called a micro service even if it does not live to all the principles
As one of the commenters on his article points out and we have reported several times in the past , the same happened with REST: The term microservice lost its meaning like REST did.
