The Evolution of Distributed Systems Towards Microservices Architecture

Applications developed to fulfil distributed systems needs have been growing rapidly. Major evolutions have happened beginning with basic architecture relying on initiated request by a client to a processing side referred to as the server. Such architectures were not enough to cope up with the fast ever-increasing number of requests and need to utilize network bandwidth. Mobile agents attempted to overcome such drawbacks but did cope up for so long with the growing technology platforms. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) then evolved to be one of the most successful representations of the client-server architecture with an added business value that provides reusable and loosely coupled services. SOA did not meet customers and business expectations as it was still relying on monolithic systems. Resilience, scalability, fast software delivery and the use of fewer resources are highly desirable features. Microservices architecture came to fulfil those expectations of system development, yet it comes with many challenges. This paper illustrates how distributed systems evolved from the traditional client-server model to the recently proposed microservices architecture. All architectures are reviewed containing brief definitions, some related work and reasoning of why they had to evolve. A feature comparison of all architectures is also provided.