Case Study: a Decade of Microservices at a Financial Firm
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Microservices are the hot new architectural pattern, but the problem with "hot" and "new" is that it can take years for the real costs of an architectural pattern to be revealed. Fortunately, the pattern isn’t new, just the name is. So, we can learn from companies that have been doing this for a decade or more.
In this case study, we’ll be looking at how microservices were implemented at a financial firm. When I had joined the firm, they had already been using the pattern for five to ten years and it continued for another half-decade under my supervision.
Since the term "microservice" didn’t exist when we started down this road, we called our 85+ microservices "process applications". The defining characteristic of our microservices was that each would perform one and only one activity. These activities included:
