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Service Based Architecture: The First Step Into Distribution
Many organizations start their journey to “microservices” by first splitting their monolith into a handful of larger services? There’s wisdom in this intermediate step. Service Based Architecture represents a pragmatic first step into distributed systems — offering many benefits of distribution without the full complexity of fine-grained decomposition.
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This is part of my System design series, you can find all posts here:
Beyond the Monolith
While our previous patterns (Monolithic, Layered, and MicroKernel) operated within a single deployment boundary, Service Based Architecture crosses that boundary. Instead of one large system, we now have several larger, loosely-coupled services — each handling a major business capability.
Think of the transition from a department store to a shopping mall. Rather than one massive store handling everything, you have several large stores, each focusing on its category — but without going to the extreme of one tiny shop per product.
System-Level Characteristics
Coarse-Grained Services
- Each service handles a complete business capability
- Services are relatively large and self-contained
- Typically 4–12 services in total
- Independent deployment and scaling
Shared Infrastructure
- Common data centers or cloud environments
- Shared monitoring and logging
- Centralized…
