A few individuals took a forward leap in moving away from monolithic to small manageable services adoption in their respective companies. Some of the most notable of these people include Jeff Bezos, Amazon's CEO, who famously implemented a mandate for Amazon (https://bit.ly/2Hb3NI5) in 2002. It stated that all employees have to adopt a service interface methodology where all communication calls would happen over the network. This daring initiative replaced the monolith with a collection of loosely coupled services. One nugget of wisdom from Jeff Bezos was two-pizza teams – individual teams shouldn't be larger than what two pizzas can feed. This colloquial wisdom is at the heart of shorter development cycles, increased deployment frequency, and faster time to market.
Netflix adopted microservices early on. It's important to mention Netflix's Open Source Software Center (OSS) contribution through https://netflix.github.io. Netflix also created a suite of automated open source tools, the Simian Army (https://github.com/Netflix/SimianArmy), to stress-test its massive cloud infrastructure. The rate at which Netflix has adopted new technologies and implemented them is phenomenal.
Lyft adopted microservices and created an open source distributed proxy known as Envoy (https://www.envoyproxy.io/) for services and applications, and would later go on to become a core part of one of the most popular service mesh implementations, such as Istio and Consul.
Though this book is not about developing microservices applications, we will briefly discuss the microservices architecture so that it is relevant from the perspective of a service mesh.
Since early 2000, when machines were still used as bare metal, three-tier monolithic applications ran on more than one machine, leading to the concept of distributed computing that was very tightly coupled. Bare metal evolved into VMs and monolithic applications into SOA/ESB with an API gateway. This trend continued until 2015 when the advent of containers disrupted the SOA/ESB way of thinking toward a self-contained, independently managed service. Due to this, the term microservice was coined.
The first mention of microservice as a term was used in a workshop of software architects in 2011 (https://bit.ly/1KljYiZ) when they used the term microservice to describe a common architectural style as a fine-grained SOA.
Chris Richardson created https://microservices.io in January 2014 to document architecture and design patterns.
James Lewis and Martin Fowler published their blog post (https://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html) about microservices in March 2014, and this blog post popularized the term microservices.
The microservices boom started with easy containerization that was made possible by Docker and through a de facto container orchestration platform known as Kubernetes, which was created for distributed computing.