A few years ago, a friend of mine shared with me a white paper that he thought would interest me. This paper described the concept of distributed application architecture through small self-contained application components deployed across a larger corporate network. Eager to impress my friend, I put down the article and exclaimed: “I know where this is going, microservices.” He smiled and replied, “Look at the published date.” To my astonishment, the white paper was published in the late ’90s on the subject of the then relatively new technology called Enterprise Java Beans (EJB).
Sometime later, I hosted a technology leadership forum at a major insurance company in New York. One of the key discussion points included emerging technologies, and of course, microservices. I used the “EJB” anecdote with a profound (sarcastic) conclusion that software architecture styles and patterns do not drastically change, but rather evolve, while software reference application architecture based on a particular technology stack has a lifecycle of emerging, mainstream, and legacy.