Part IV: Technologies

Part IV moves away from the theoretical to show the technologies involved in actual implementations of microservices.

Chapter 13, “Example of a Microservices-Based Architecture,” contains a complete example of a microservices architecture based on Java, Spring, Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, the Netflix stack, and Docker. The example is a good starting point for your own implementation or experiments. Many of the technological challenges discussed in Part III are solved in this part with the aid of concrete technologies—for instance, build, deployment, service discovery, communication, load balancing, and tests.

Even smaller than microservices are the nanoservices discussed in Chapter 14, “Technologies for Nanoservices.” They require special technologies and a number of compromises. The chapter introduces technologies that can implement very small services—Amazon Lambda for JavaScript, Python and Java; OSGi for Java; Java EE; and Vert.x on the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) with support for languages like Java, Scala, Clojure, Groovy, Ceylon, JavaScript, Ruby, and Python. The programming language Erlang can also be used for very small services, and it is able to integrate with other systems. Seneca is a specialized JavaScript framework for the implementation of nanoservices.

At the close of the book Chapter 15, “Getting Started with Microservices,” concludes by reiterating the benefits of using microservices and discusses how you might go about starting to use them.