Articles
Microservices
The essay that put a name and a definition to an architectural style most of us were already half-doing by instinct — nine characteristics, from componentization via services to decentralized data management, laid out with none of the conference-talk hype the term later picked up. What holds up more than a decade later is the honesty about the cost side: microservices trade simplicity for operational complexity, and Fowler and Lewis say so plainly rather than selling it as a free upgrade. If you only ever read one primary source before an architecture debate about services vs. monolith, make it this one.