Okay, microservices look like what used to be called agents. For their communications there have been various efforts at ways to define data objects, complete with a registration hierarchy (that is, a case of public naming) and an inheritance hierarchy (roughly like some of inheritance in some cases of object oriented software). So, we had object request brokers, CORBA or some such. And we had the ISO/OSI CMIS/CMIP where ISO maybe abbreviates international standards organization, where OSI may abbreviate something in French, where some international telecommunications group, maybe part of the UN, was involved, and where CMIS abbreviated common management information system, and CMIP, common management information protocol, all mostly aimed at computer and network system monitoring and management. The work was somehow close to some old Unix work with management information base and ASN.1 -- abstract syntax notation version 1. Whew!
Okay, if there are to be lots of such microservices, as you nicely described, then they will want to be able to communicate. So, maybe they will want to use JSON (as I understand it, essentially just name-value pairs -- from Google, JavaScript Object Notation and, thus, maybe more than just name-value pairs), other mark up languages,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_document_markup_langua...
etc. But we'd have to suspect that there needs to be some common global standards and data definitions.
Okay. Gee, in the past I went through a lot of that CMIS/CMIP, ASN.1, etc. stuff, wrote some internal papers, wrote some software, etc. so was totally torqued at microservices without definitions. Right, maybe the hidden secret is that we're supposed to retreat to Wikipedia for the undefined terms and acronyms -- bummer.
But, I still wonder: How popular, pervasive, important, practical so far are microservices? E.g., are they a lot like agents for system monitoring and management? Where are microservices getting to be important.
No, I'm not trolling. And with your description of microservices, we're making progress here.