Choosing a Platform for a new microservice

Microservices endorses using different technologies to build components of a solution or a system. You can have components based on Java or Scala with Spring or C# & .Net etc. But if you are going to build a new microservice which platform should you use? Most developer’s or architects would choose based on their background if they came from Java they choose Java or .net if they are from .net. This kind of reminds me of an old Dilbert comic in it Dilbert tells the marketing manager that he can draw a fish on the screen. It sounds to me like most architects choose a platform because they are familiar with not because of its merits. I am working on devising a decision tree to select which platform is more suitable for a microservices. So far if you are building a microservice to interact with Hadoop/Spark or Kafka Java/Scala/Spring is the platform to go, though there are lots of libraries that makes it easy to develop such microservices in .Net. I am still working on this but thought I should share it. Let me know your thoughts and why would you choose a platform over the other?

Java Scala /Spring MVC

• Pros:

  • Respected in the business
  • Widespread
  • Constrained coding style might lead to easier to read code
  • Better ecosystem for libraries and tools
• Cons:
  • Verbose, both with the language and framework
  • Does not have as good support for threading and asynchrony as C# has with async/await

C#/ASP.NET Core

• Pros:
  • Asynchronous -oriented
  • Better generics, and integration with LINQ
  • Better IDE integration, and configuration setup
  • Quicker to get things up and running in
  • Able to be component oriented as well as MVC
  • Availability of other programming styles than OOP, including functional.
  • More low-level constructs allowing optimization
• Cons:
  
  • Newer, slightly buggy
    
  • Not as battle-tested as Java
    
  • Heavy IDE (although you can use Visual Studio Code, too)