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Microservices: The Evolution and Extinction of Web Services?

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Microservices

Abstract

In the early 2000s, service-oriented architectures (SOA) emerged as a paradigm for distributed computing, e-business processing, and enterprise integration. Rapidly, SOA and web services became the subject of hype, and virtually every organization tried to adopt them, no matter their actual suitability. Even worse, there were nearly as many definitions of SOA as people adopting it. This led to a big fail on many of those attempts, as they tried to change the problem to fit the solution. Nowadays, microservices are the new weapon of choice to achieve the same (and even more) goals posed to SOA years ago. Microservices (“SOA done right”) describe a particular way of designing software applications as suites of independently deployable services, bringing dynamism, modularity, distributed development, and integration of heterogeneous systems. However, nothing comes for free: new (and old) challenges appeared, including service design and specification, data integrity, and consistency management. In this chapter, we identify such challenges through an evolutionary view from the early years of SOA to microservices, and beyond. Our findings are backed by a literature review, comprising both academic and gray literature. Afterwards, we analyze how such challenges are addressed in practice, and which challenges remain open, by inspecting microservice-related projects on GitHub, the largest open-source repository to date.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been partially supported by the GAUSS national research project, which has been funded by the MIUR under the PRIN 2015 program (Contract 2015KWREMX); and by the grant ANPCyT PICT-2017-1725.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Luciano Baresi

  2. Faculty of Informatics, National University of Comahue, Neuquán, Argentina

    Martin Garriga

  3. CONICET, National Scientific and Technical Research Council, Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Martin Garriga

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  1. Luciano Baresi
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Correspondence to Martin Garriga .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Distributed Adaptive Systems (DAS) Research Unit, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento, Italy

    Antonio Bucchiarone

  2. Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, Technical University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark

    Nicola Dragoni

  3. Distributed Systems Group, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria

    Schahram Dustdar

  4. Dept of Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Patricia Lago

  5. Institute of Technologies and Software Development, Innopolis University, Innopolis, Russia

    Manuel Mazzara

  6. Institute of Technologies and Software Development, Innopolis University, Innopolis, Russia

    Victor Rivera

  7. Innopolis University, Innopolis, Russia

    Andrey Sadovykh

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Baresi, L., Garriga, M. (2020). Microservices: The Evolution and Extinction of Web Services?. In: Bucchiarone, A., et al. Microservices. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31646-4_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31646-4_1

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