If you had a pulse in the ’90s, you most definitely saw Jurassic Park. And if you are a person who totally loves dinosaurs, like myself, you probably saw Jurassic Park at least a dozen more times in the theater.
While the Jurassic Park blockbusters live on, dinosaurs, do not. There are a handful of theories explaining their extinction: An asteroid. Climate change. The exorbitant amount of resources needed to sustain their giant bodies. Some even say that their brains were too small for their big bodies. Despite the mystery, a changing environment and their generally huge scale are frequently part of the debate.
One direct descendant of the dinosaur was able to survive. Yep, you got it, the bird. Interesting that a micro-version of the dinosaur, one that is compact, light, efficient, and adaptable is what remains. Is this foreshadowing for what’s to come with technology? Are we at the end of the technological Cretaceous period (a Techtaceous period, if you will)? I think so.
Big, all-inclusive dinosaur technology is dying out and being replaced with smaller and more agile setups. It is a move from monolithic software to microservices, and Amazon, Google, Netflix and Uber are among the companies that have made the transition. They are doing this for good reason; monolithic architecture is difficult to sustain.
Monoliths vs. Microservices
Monolithic architecture refers to the traditional approach of building software as a whole – one, interdependent and often large component (CMSWire). If you need to scale up, you must duplicate the whole system with more machines. Adding new features or functionality can impact the entire system because deployment must be done as a whole.
Contrast that with a microservices architecture, where an application is developed with many small services that can be independently built, tested, deployed and maintained. These services can even be built in different programming languages. This structure allows developers to “segment and isolate sections of a software, resulting in, ‘little software components [that] talk to each other via APIs, [which can be] scaled independently,’” says [John] Rector, [Co-found of DialPad].
