Microservices

Microservices are an architectural approach to building software systems that structures an application as a collection of loosely coupled services. Each service is self-contained and implements specific business capabilities.

Microservices architectures break large monolithic applications into smaller, decentralized units. For example, an e-commerce system could be split into separate services for the product catalog, shopping cart, payment processing, etc. Each microservice can be developed, tested, deployed and scaled independently. This provides benefits like the ability to use different technologies in each service and faster development through parallel teams. The services communicate through APIs, usually with lightweight protocols like REST. Containers and orchestration platforms like Kubernetes are commonly used to deploy microservices. The decentralized nature of microservices can add complexity around distributed computing issues like consensus and resilience. However, microservices enable continuous delivery and scaling of applications, and allow developers to innovate faster.