In this first chapter, you will get to know the basics of microservices. They have been an upcoming trend over the last few years and gained popularity particularly amongst start-ups and projects that are built to grow. Their appeal is that they are designed to be scalable but also offer great flexibility to the programmer. By the end of this book, you will be capable of writing your own microservices for apps and frontends using the Swift framework, Vapor. This chapter will give you an overview of what microservices are and how they are useful in web development.
Microservices are small, individual services that form an application by working together. In contrast to that, monoliths are applications that are operating out of one central service that does not depend on other services. Most traditional off-the-shelf systems such as WordPress and Drupal are monoliths.
Both microservices as well as their counterpart, monoliths, are central elements of modern web development and before you start developing your own, you should understand the essential theory for their usage. You will specifically explore the following topics in this chapter:
- What is a microservice?
- Understanding why to choose microservices
- Understanding why not to choose microservices
- Who is using microservices?
- Monolith versus microservices
- Upgrading from monolith to microservices
After reading this chapter, you will be prepared to start working on your microservices.