Microservices Explained
An application program interface (API) is a set of routines, protocols, and tools that allow applications — in this context, services within a microservice architecture — to talk to each other. So the answer is no: APIs are not microservices. Think of them as messengers that deliver requests and responses, rather than microservices, which allow each part of the application (components) to function autonomously. APIs are also used in programming the components of graphical user interfaces (GUIs). However, keep in mind that microservices must conform to a well-established (REST or otherwise) API to provide their "work" to the rest of the application.
Microservices are architectural components, whereas REST (Representational State Transfer) is an HTTP-based web service for communication between applications. Restful APIs enable microservices to work together while keeping them decoupled. While RESTful APIs aren’t strictly required for microservices, they do make it easy to build microservices that are loosely coupled. Other types of APIs like gRPC can be used, or just use event-driven functionality.
Microservices themselves are not a technology. Microservices are a software architecture that involves splitting large applications into small pieces that communicate with each other. Then, these individual services can be deployed, built, and maintained by smaller groups of software engineers.
One reason to use microservices is that any language can be used on individual microservices. To build microservices, a common communication protocol could be used for each component. As long as this is in place, the microservices can be programmed in different languages.
When it comes to deploying and managing large applications with thousands of microservices architectures, understanding the application as a whole and ensuring proper communication across all the components can be challenging. Thankfully, tools such as Kubernetes make this much easier.
Another disadvantage of using microservices lies in data consistency. As multiple databases can be used, some redundancy might be needed. Ensuring consistency across all the sources might require some architectural changes when building microservices.
Generally, the microservices handle backend logic and data, and they don’t have a UI. However, some microservices will contain the UI or parts of the UI for the application. Recently, there has been an emergence of frameworks to help split large UIs into smaller components. This new pattern is called _micro_ front end and aims at bringing the benefits of building microservices to application front ends.
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