Building Microservices, 2nd Edition

Afterword: Bringing It All Together

This book has covered a lot of ground, and I’ve shared a lot of advice along the way. Given the breadth of coverage, I thought it sensible to summarize some of my key advice regarding microservice architectures. For those of you who have read the whole book, this should be a great refresher. For those of you who are impatient and jumped to the end, be aware that there is a lot of detail behind this advice, and I’d urge you read up on the detail behind some of these ideas rather than just adopting these ideas blindly.

With all that said, I’m aiming to keep this last chapter as brief as possible, so let’s get started.

What Are Microservices?

As introduced in Chapter 1, microservices are a type of service-oriented architecture that focuses on independent deployability. Independent deployability means that you can make a change to a microservice, deploy that microservice, and release its functionality to the end users without requiring other microservices to change. Getting the most out of a microservice architecture means embracing this concept. Normally, each microservice is deployed as a process, with communication with other microservices being done over some form of network protocol. It’s common to deploy multiple instances of a microservice, perhaps so that you can provide more scale, or else to improve robustness by having redundancy.

To deliver independent deployability, we need to make sure when changing one microservice that we don’t ...