Many of the pioneers initially developed monolithic applications that made them very successful from a business perspective. But over time, these monolithic applications became more and more difficult to maintain and evolve. They also became challenging to scale beyond the capabilities of the largest machines available (also known as vertical scaling). Eventually, the pioneers started to find ways to split monolithic applications into smaller components that could be released and scaled independently of each other. Scaling small components can be done using horizontal scaling, that is, deploying a component on a number of smaller servers and placing a load balancer in front of it. If done in the cloud, the scaling capability is potentially endless – it is just a matter of how many virtual servers you bring in (given that your component can scale out on a huge number of instances, but more on that later on).

In 2014, I also learned about a number of new open source projects that delivered tools and frameworks that simplified the development of microservices and could be used to handle the challenges that come with a microservice-based architecture. Some of these are as follows: