Mikroservices

Mikroservices, also known as microservices, is an architectural style that structures an application as a collection of small, autonomous services. Each service implements a single business capability and can be developed, deployed, scaled, and retired independently. Services typically own their own data and communicate with others through lightweight protocols such as HTTP/REST or asynchronous messaging. The organization around services often aligns with bounded contexts in domain-driven design.

Key characteristics include loose coupling, explicit service boundaries, autonomous teams, decentralized data management, and automated deployment and operation. Services are designed to handle failures gracefully, with timeouts, retries, circuit breakers, and idempotent operations. The system tends to be observable through logging, tracing, and metrics to diagnose distributed behavior.

Benefits include improved scalability, resilience, and faster release cycles, as teams can iterate on individual services with minimal coordination. Heterogeneous technology stacks may be used for different services, and cloud-native environments support rapid provisioning, scaling, and isolation. Common patterns include an API gateway to expose a unified interface, a service mesh for inter-service communication, and event-driven or message-driven integration.

Challenges involve distributed complexity, data consistency across services, testing across boundaries, deployment coordination, and operational overhead. Network latency, security, and versioning of APIs require careful governance. Organizations often start with a modular monolith or a small set of services and gradually increase decoupling as capabilities mature.

Compared with monolithic architectures, Mikroservices emphasize independent deployment and scalability but demand stronger DevOps practices and monitoring capabilities. They are widely associated with cloud-native and agile development approaches.