How to (not) lock yourself into architectural drawbacks, or, Microservice architecture as the reification of Pi-Calculus
Reification: the treatment of something abstract as a material or concrete thing, as in the following lines from Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach”: (Britannica 2018)
The microservice architecture(MA) has taken a deep hold in the collective imagination of the software engineering community since at least 20141. This has happened despite serious and well documented drawbacks.
Such combination calls for an explanation. A sketch of such explanation is my intent here, starting with what MA is, at bottom. At a later date I intend to provide a history of how it came to be a dominant architecture on our industry.
My position is that MA is a reification(Britannica 2018) of abstract processes as defined by the Pi-Calculus (PC). Why do I think of that? Let’s start by defining things.
… π-calculus lets you represent processes, parallel composition of processes, synchronous communication between processes through channels, creation of fresh channels, replication of processes, and nondeterminism … A process is an abstraction of an independent thread of control. A channel is an abstraction of the communication link between two processes. Processes interact with each other by sending and receiving messages over channels. (Wing 2002)
