Microservice architecture

For the last few years, up to the time of writing this book, everyone has been talking about microservices, even though they've been around since 2011. It is clearly a hot topic in the software industry community.

There are so many definitions of the microservice architecture, and we will come to one of them eventually toward the end of this section. However, we would first like to share a story of how we ended up with a microservice-like architecture in one of the large-scale e-commerce platforms that we built around the same time the term microservice started to become more prevalent in the software industry community.

The e-commerce platform was built using a framework based on standard Java EE technologies.

The architecture of that e-commerce platform followed the standard N-tier application architecture, namely, the three-tier architecture. In this architecture, there is a presentation layer (UI), which mainly contains the web pages for...