Building Microservices

Newman, S. (2015). Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems. O'Reilly Media.

Type

Book

Intellectual base

Review or monograph

Year

2015

Link

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/building-microservices/9781491950340/

Cited from

architecture_urban_planning, chemistry_materials, computer_science, information_theory

Cited by

8 citations across 8 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Coarsening
  • Software architecture: small services consolidate when per-service overhead (separate deployment, monitoring, on-call) is high relative to the service's own work, structurally the same as grain coarsening.

    This sourceTreats per-service overhead (deployment, monitoring, on-call) versus the service's own work, and bounded contexts as the boundary that prevents over-consolidation.

• Design Patterns

  • This sourceTreats microservice granularity and inter-service coordination cost as tunable design parameters. Cited inline in §5, §9, and the example (tier B — supports the incremental-microservices-decomposition claim).

• Holarchy
  • Service-oriented and microservice architectures are in effect engineered holarchies: each service hides its internals and presents a stable contract upward.

    This sourceCanonical treatment of microservice architecture: partitions an application into independently deployable services each owning one narrow concern, and frames service granularity (and the coordination cost of inter-service calls) as a tunable design parameter — the computing instance of optimal-partition-depth reasoning.

• Interfacial Energy
  • The surfactant-class agent is any shared protocol library, code-generation tool, or standardized RPC framework (gRPC, a shared schema registry) that lowers the per-seam cost and makes finer subdivision viable.

    This sourceTreats inter-service call overhead (serialization, network latency, schema coordination) and shared tooling/RPC frameworks that lower the per-seam cost of service boundaries.

• Modularity
  • Newman's 2015 microservices analysis catalogs these failure modes systematically: low coupling at the interface level does not entail loose coupling at the system level.

    This sourceCatalogs hidden runtime coupling modes — timing, resource availability, data consistency, operational context — that can defeat apparent low interface coupling in distributed module architectures.

• Pipeline
  • Buffering capacity between stages to decouple and smooth flow
• Registry-Mediated Discovery
  • Microservice service discovery: services register current network endpoints under logical names; consumers query the name and receive an up-to-date endpoint.
• Versioning
  • Listed in the references but not attached to a specific claim.

Verification

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