Microservices, Containers and Kubernetes in 10 Minutes

If these things keep coming up in your day-to-day and you need an overview in 10 minutes, this blog post is for you.Fundamentally, a microservice is just a computer program which runs on a server or a virtual computing instance and responds to network requests.How is this different from a typical Rails/Django/Node.js application? Each of those teams usually wants the freedom to:As you can imagine, having the teams agree on everything to ship newer versions of the web store application will become more difficult over time.The solution is to split up the components into smaller, separate services (aka, microservices).The application process becomes smaller and dumber. You may even get rid of it entirely and offload that job to a user’s device, having this code run in a browser as a single-page JavaScript app.The other microservices are now separated out and each development team working on their microservice can:A container is just a method of packaging, deploying and running a Linux program/process. Some parts of your application can benefit from the speed of C++ while others can benefit from increased productivity of higher level languages such as Python or JavaScript.The drawbacks of microservices include:If an application and development team is small enough and the workload isn’t challenging, there is usually no need to throw additional engineering resources into solving problems you do not have yet and use microservices.