Understanding the microservices architecture

The microservices architecture is an application architecture adopted for building enterprise-level applications. To understand microservices architecture, it's important to first understand monolithic architecture, which is its opposite. In monolithic architecture, different functional components of the server-side application, such as payment processing, account management, push notifications, and other components, all blend together in a single unit.

For example, applications are usually divided into three parts. The parts are HTML pages or native UI that run on the user's machine, a server-side application that runs on the server, and a database that also runs on the server. The server-side application is responsible for handling HTTP requests, retrieving and storing data in a database, and executing algorithms. If the server-side application is a single executable (that is, running is a single process) that does all these tasks, then we say...