Building Reactive Microservices in Java

Chapter 1. Introduction

This report is for developers and architects interested in developing microservices and distributed applications. It does not explain the basics of distributed systems, but instead focuses on the reactive benefits to build efficient microservice systems. Microservices can be seen as an extension of the basic idea of modularity: programs connected by message-passing instead of direct API calls so that they can be distributed among multiple services. Why are microservices so popular? It’s basically due to the combination of two factors: cloud computing and the need to scale up and down quickly. Cloud computing makes it convenient to deploy thousands of small services; scaling makes it necessary to do so.

In this report, we will see how Eclipse Vert.x (http://vertx.io) can be used to build reactive microservice systems. Vert.x is a toolkit to build reactive and distributed systems. Vert.x is incredibly flexible. Because it’s a toolkit, you can build simple network utilities, modern web applications, a system ingesting a huge amount of messages, REST services, and, obviously, microservices. This malleability gives Vert.x great popularity, a large community, and a vibrant ecosystem. Vert.x was already promoting microservices before it became so popular. Since the beginning, Vert.x has been tailored to build applications composed by a set of distributed and autonomous services. Systems using Vert.x are built upon the reactive system principles (http://reactivemanifesto.org ...