Microservices Introduction

Microservices is a set of practices that make using decentralized services practical.

The concepts, principles, and algorithms we’ve learned in previous lessons are all in play with microservices. The patterns and techniques introduced in this lesson address how to build distributed systems that are both available and scalable. 

Microservices introduce a dynamic element to distributed systems that we haven’t yet discussed.

Scaling a distributed application and making it highly available calls for new practices. These practices include both technical patterns for designing large-scale distributed systems as well as software engineering techniques for managing development teams as well as building, deploying, and monitoring applications.

This lesson will focus on the technical concerns and only briefly touch on others. If you’re interested in learning more about these, links to some introductory articles are included in Additional Resources.

Lesson Objectives

After completing this lesson, you should be able to

  1. Describe the scalability cube, y-axis scaling, and its applicability to architecting large-scale distributed systems.
  2. Explain the appeal of microservice architectures in building modern online applications.
  3. Describe the drawbacks of the direct client-to-microservice approach and explain how API gateways mitigate those drawbacks.
  4. Explain the common service registry patterns and why they’re necessary.
  5. Describe the techniques used to managed complexity in microservice architectures.

Required Reading/Viewing

Additional Resources