Evolution of Microservice Architecture and Essential Technology Stack

Introduction: Software design scale has grown, leading to higher demands for performance, throughput, stability, and scalability; new terms like distributed, SOA, microservices, and middle platform have emerged.

The author records his learning process of microservices, including implementation details and personal understanding, and invites feedback.

Architecture evolution: The article outlines three periods of microservice architecture development—monolithic, vertical splitting, and distributed services—based on personal interpretation.

1. Monolithic architecture: A single‑process application that is simple to develop but suffers from maintenance difficulty, tight coupling, poor scalability, and high failure impact.

2. Vertical splitting: Business vertical division creates independent systems, improving deployment independence but increasing storage complexity and duplication.

3. Distributed services: Independent services communicate across processes, reducing code duplication but introducing challenges such as data consistency, availability, and increased operational cost.

4. Microservice architecture: An evolution of distributed services that decomposes business logic into many small, independent services, offering high availability, scalability, language heterogeneity, and independent deployment, while bringing higher complexity and network overhead.

5. Service‑Oriented Architecture (SOA): Described as a component model that splits functionality into services with well‑defined interfaces.

Microservice development versions: centralized proxy (Nginx V1.0), client‑embedded (Consul V2.0), and service mesh (Istio), each addressing service discovery, load balancing, and governance.

Essential technology stack for microservices includes service communication (WebService, WCF, WebAPI), process communication (gRPC), API gateway (Ocelot), authentication/authorization (IdentityServer4), transient fault handling (Polly), distributed tracing (SkyAPM), logging (Exceptionless, ELK/Beats), configuration center (Apollo), distributed lock (Consul, Redis, ZooKeeper, DB), distributed transaction (2PC, TCC, Saga), containerization (Docker), container orchestration (Kubernetes), and CI/CD (Jenkins).

Conclusion: The author plans to study each technology in depth and encourages continuous improvement.