Unraveling Microservices : A study on microservices and its complexity

Sammanfattning: Microservices is one of the most commonly used buzzword of the systems architecture industry and is being adopted by several of the world’s largest technology companies such as Netflix, Uber and Amazon. The architecture which embraces splitting up your system in smaller independent units is an extension of the service-oriented architecture and an opponent of the monolithic architecture. Being a top buzzword and promises of extreme scalability has spiked the interest for microservices, but unlike the relatively simple monolithic architecture the complexity of microservices creates a new set of obstacles. This work sheds a light on these issues and implements solutions for some of the most frequent problems using a case study. The study shows that while microservices can help reduce the inner complexity of a system, it greatly increases the outer complexity and creates the need for a variety of tools aimed at distributed systems. It also concludes that communication and data storage are two of the most frequently occurring issues when developing microservices with the most difficult one being how you reason with and structure your data, especially for efficient queries across microservices.