Microservice Architectures for Scalability, Agility and Reliability in E-Commerce

Microservice architectures provide small services that may be deployed and scaled independently of each other, and may employ different middleware stacks for their implementation. Microservice architectures intend to overcome the shortcomings of monolithic architectures where all of the application's logic and data are managed in one deployable unit. We present how the properties of microservice architectures facilitate scalability, agility and reliability at otto.de, which is one of the biggest European e-commerce platforms. In particular, we discuss vertical decomposition into self contained systems and appropriate granularity of microservices as well as coupling, integration, scalability and monitoring of microservices at otto.de. While increasing agility to more than 500 live deployments per week, high reliability is achieved by means of automated quality assurance with continuous integration and deployment.