In the last 6 months or so, I’ve become a huge fan of Microservices. I love the concept because Microservices are a fantastic extension of domain driven design. One of the core behaviors of Microservices is that no other process is allowed to talk to the data it contains directly (in a database, for example). Any process that needs access to this data, needs to talk to the Microservice. This is exactly what a business entity (aggregate or not) in a domain model is doing. This is what encapsulation in object orientation is all about. To be more specific, a typical domain object has behavior and data, as you know. A domain object will not (and should not) let any other object or process access its data until it passes through its behavior(s). That’s why domain objects (entities) have clearly defined interfaces to talk to.
Now, if you scale this behavior up into components that run in their own processes, these microservices are doing the same thing but from a component point of view: “No other object running in another process is allowed to access another process’s data unless it talks to the behavior of this other component, the other microservice”. This has been my observation and I really have become to like the concept of Microservices. Microservices are a fantastic way of building cloud-based software and with the right PaaS solution, you can create Microservices on premise and simply deploy to a PaaS that also runs on premise or in a public cloud such as Cloud Foundry or AWS, for example.
I’m a huge fan of Martin Fowler. It is not “official” until Martin Fowler has written or spoken about any subject in the Software Industry. Anyway, here is Martin Fowler’s awesome 25 minute explanation of Microservices.
Thomas Jaeger 