By Tony Bradley
Al Hilwa, program director of application development software at IDC, describes it this way: “Microservices is an architectural approach that draws on long, evolving experience in software engineering and system design, including the SOA efforts of the last two decades. 
Microservices architecture is enabled by a spectrum of tool categories, but is primarily an architectural approach to system design that also requires considerable organizational and cultural adjustment to execute successfully.”
More succinctly, microservices is a blanket term that applies to breaking IT systems and applications down to smaller, more granular elements. Containers take applications and services down to a self-contained, component level, and DevOps provides the framework for the IT infrastructure and automation to develop, deploy, and manage the environment.
Jason Bloomberg, president of Intellyx, talks about the distinction between a typical web service and a microservice, arguing against the tendency to try to simply rebrand web services as microservices. “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 [enterprise service bus].”
Read the entire article at http://techbeacon.com/challenges-scaling-microservices.
