Microservices Architecture
Table of Contents
Overview
Comprehensive guide to designing, implementing, and maintaining microservices architectures. Covers service decomposition, communication patterns, data management, deployment strategies, and observability for distributed systems.
When to Use
- Designing new microservices architectures
- Decomposing monolithic applications
- Implementing service-to-service communication
- Setting up API gateways and service mesh
- Implementing service discovery
- Managing distributed transactions
- Designing inter-service data consistency
- Scaling independent services
Quick Start
Minimal working example:
Bounded Contexts:
┌─────────────────┐ ┌─────────────────┐ ┌─────────────────┐
│ Order Service │ │ User Service │ │ Payment Service │
│ │ │ │ │ │
│ - Create Order │ │ - User Profile │ │ - Process Pay │
│ - Order Status │ │ - Auth │ │ - Refund │
│ - Order History │ │ - Preferences │ │ - Transactions │
└─────────────────┘ └─────────────────┘ └─────────────────┘Reference Guides
Detailed implementations in the references/ directory:
| Guide | Contents |
|---|---|
| Service Boundary Design | Service Boundary Design |
| Communication Patterns | Communication Patterns |
| API Gateway Pattern | API Gateway Pattern |
| Service Discovery | Service Discovery |
| Data Consistency Patterns | Data Consistency Patterns |
| Service Mesh (Istio) | Service Mesh (Istio) |
Best Practices
✅ DO
- Design services around business capabilities
- Use asynchronous communication where possible
- Implement circuit breakers for resilience
- Use API gateway for cross-cutting concerns
- Implement distributed tracing
- Use service mesh for service-to-service communication
- Design for failure (chaos engineering)
- Implement health checks for all services
- Use correlation IDs for request tracking
- Version your APIs
- Implement proper monitoring and alerting
- Use event-driven architecture for loose coupling
- Implement idempotent operations
- Use database per service pattern
❌ DON'T
- Share databases between services
- Create overly granular services (nanoservices)
- Use distributed transactions (two-phase commit)
- Ignore network latency and failures
- Share domain models between services
- Deploy all services as one unit
- Hardcode service URLs
- Forget to implement authentication/authorization
- Use synchronous calls for long-running operations
- Ignore backward compatibility
- Skip monitoring and logging
- Create circular dependencies between services