Patrick R. McElhiney has worked on developing web services in the past, such as MeAndYou, that has an engine that makes matches for searches that are entered by multiple users through a Graphical User Interface (GUI) that can run on a different node. The Match Engine can be considered a microservice, which is decoupled from the rest of the system - essentially in its own little world, that allows the program to perform a service to a much larger application domain without having to be integrated into the code of the rest of the web service.
This is a common architecture now used in the online business, and by many larger companies, because of the need to un-link different parts of a larger application into smaller services that can act on their own, and there are many different advantages to doing this. One advantage, is that the entire system as a whole becomes much more reliable, because you can run multiple instances of the microservice, and have a gateway with a load balancer that determines which instance should be directed what traffic - or, in the case of MeAndYou, the architecture allows different instances to all work off stream processing from a message queue. This allows the data to be processed in real time, rather than waiting for small batches to run, which may not complete before another batch starts - making the batch process difficult to manage in some cases.
Patrick published his Thesis on a hybrid web architecture that uses the Big Data as well as the Microservices architectures to accomplish scaling with Amazon Web Services, without the need to spend on resources that are not being used. One advantage of MeAndYou, is that the microservice doesn't copy the database to perform its work - even though it is completely decoupled from the web interface. This allows efficient match making, without the need for multiple instances of even portions of the large database of the social media platform.
For more information about how Patrick can help your organization with Web Microservices Development, please contact us.
