Somebody call the buzzword police: we have a serious case of microservices-washing in progress. The term “microservices-washing” is derived from “whitewashing,” meaning to hide some inconvenient truth with bluster and nonsense.
We saw plenty of cloudwashing a few years ago, as vendors and enterprises alike pretended what they were doing was cloud, even though it wasn’t. Today, the hype around microservices has led to the same kind of obfuscation, as vendors and enterprise technologists alike are saying they’re building microservices—even though a cursory look at what they’re really up to wouldn’t uncover a single one.
Only by stripping away the hype of microservices-washing can vendors and practitioners alike garner the true value from microservices.
If not microservices, then what?
The notion of a service as a way to expose a software capability came into its own at the beginning of the century with the rise of web services. Fed up with the inflexibility and tight coupling of CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture), the vendor community hammered out a set of XML-related standards for implementing software interfaces that abstracted the underlying implementation of software endpoints.
Until the rise of microservices, in fact, the notion of a service was a software interface. Vendors loved this definition, because it allowed them to create their own proprietary execution environments to add to their middleware offerings, renaming them enterprise service buses (ESBs).
A microservice, in contrast, is a parsimonious, cohesive unit of execution. It’s decidedly not a software interface itself, although it obviously has one. Instead, at the heart of the microservice is the running code itself. Microservices also contain their own runtime, so they don’t need to run on an ESB.
Read the entire article at http://techbeacon.com/dangers-microservices-washing-get-value-strip-away-hype.
