Microservices: A perfect SOA based solution for Enterprise Applications compared to Web Services
Vinay Raj, Ravichandra Sadam · 2018
The Software Engineering community has defined different types of architectures to build applications. One among them is Service Oriented Architecture(SOA) which has created significant impact the way software applications are built. There are many implementations of SOA like Web Services, REST services etc. But Web Services and REST services do not fully follow all the principles of SOA. Microservices as an architectural style recently emerged from SOA by which we can develop business requirements with loosely coupled, self deploying and scalable services. Microservices have gained more popularity in application development as they are easy to understand, scale and deploy. In this paper we discuss principles of SOA, major drawbacks of web services and benefits of Microservices over SOA based web services. We have highlighted the importance of Microservices in software development. This paper gives information for architects as to why choose Microservices architecture over web services. We have also discussed metrics used for calculating Coupling between services and we evaluated by considering a smart payment application for ecommerce which is built using both the styles. We observed that Microservices architectural style has less coupling between services compared to Web Service style based on the metric values of the application.