The cloud industry is evolving quickly right now, and when it comes to the big trends likes containers and serverless it can be hard to work out the difference.

Are Containers Serverless? No. Containers are a method of packaging up an application with its dependencies. Container technology does not mandate how the application is to be executed. However there are container platforms which allow you to execute containers in a way that is serverless.

That definition might seem like a bit of a tongue twister, but I’m precise for a good reason, as it is important to understand clearly the boundaries of the two technologies. There’s some nuance involved in answering todays question, so let’s break things down. Let’s start with containers and what they are.

Microservices have been talked about a lot in the last few years. And it’s commonly accepted practice that applications should start as monolithic applications before being broken down into Microservices. In fact that’s exactly how we made Splitoo.

Earlier in 2019 I made a commitment to improve some technical aspects of Splitoo. One of which aspect you could call Microservices. At Splitoo since we’re a small team, we made some fairly intuitive decisions to break down the application into Microservices based on some tell-tale signs that it needed it.

What we realised is that our decisions to break down the app came from getting more intuitive about the tell-tale signs that an application is getting too big, and could benefit from being broken down into microservices. And that’s what we’ll be talking about today.

By the end of this article you should know four tell-tale signs that an application could benefit from being architected with a Microservice approach.