From monoliths to microservices, from libraries to sidecars - an overview of emerging architectural patterns

In recent years we’ve transitioned away from monolithic applications, where multiple modules are tightly integrated into a single running application process. We’ve now moved towards decoupled architectural designs composed of multiple microservices, where individual software components run as separate processes and form a fully functioning system when connected together. A similar shift is now happening at a lower abstraction level. New architectural patterns are emerging, where Instead of composing an application from a main application module utilizing multiple libraries, we split it up into several co-located processes. This group of processes is usually a main process and one or more sidecar processes. As with microservices, each of those sidecars can be developed independently and written in a different programming language. These changes in architecture are the result of new deployment platforms, such as Kubernetes and Docker, which have made deploying these types of multi-process apps very easy. In this talk, we’ll look at some of these emerging architectural patterns - what they are and what are the benefits and drawbacks of using them.