Now that the year is wrapping to an end, use of microservice architecture continue on the rise. However, people are often confused in understanding the use and more importantly, rational behind creation of these services which are not to be confused with API and providing versioning of them in silo-ed manner, but to ensure that all end consumers are accommodated by them.
In a recent technology radar, a term 'Microservice As A Product' was promoted, which prompted my introspection and in my opinion is misleading because when you market a product, there are a bunch of micro services that are documented and provided, and over time, these grow and parallel services provide an alternative - while the original ones remain for backward compatibility.
It is true that established players are promoting microservices in cloud and also provide a marketplace, but treating it as a product is a bit far fetched; as terming it as tooling (a software component) rather fits the job well. Otherwise, we are bound to be stuck with the naming conventions and keep getting confused (similar to an application and a plugin).
