Microservices is the talk of the town these days, even if the term and technology has actually been around for a while now. Why is everyone suddenly interested in microservices architecture? What has changed? To understand microservices, I sat down with Patrick Chanezon, chief developer advocate at Docker at the Open Source Leadership Summit Sonoma, California.

Chanezon provided a brief history lesson about the evolution of microservices architecture to explain why everyone is talking about it these days. He said at the end of nineties and early 2000s, developers were structuring their applications into what we call monoliths. Those applications required dedicated, proprietary servers to run. With Java applications, Java App Server was required. With .NET, an IIS server was required.

In a monolithic architecture, everything is bundled together. If you want to upgrade or update just one service, the entire app must be updated. Monoliths have their own disadvantages. Most importantly they slow organizations down, who end up spending more resources in managing the infrastructure that runs those apps, instead of investing in the apps themselves.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/XXKaI0Xnde0