Building Reactive Microservices in Java

Chapter 6. Conclusion

We are at the end of our journey together, but you have many new avenues to explore. We have covered a lot of content in this small report but certainly didn’t cover everything! We have just scratched the surface. There are more things to consider when moving toward reactive microservices. Vert.x is also not limited to microservices and can handle a large set of different use cases.

What Have We Learned?

So, what did you learn in this report? First, we started with microservices and what are reactive microservices. We learned that reactive microservices are the building blocks of responsive microservice systems. We also saw how reactive programming helps to build these microservices.

We discovered Eclipse Vert.x, a toolkit used to build reactive microservices (among many other things). Vert.x provides the perfect paradigm to embrace microservices: asynchronous, failures as first-class citizens, and nonblocking. To tame the asynchronous development model, Vert.x combines its power with RxJava. Our discovery started with HTTP microservices and how to consume them. While HTTP is often used in microservices, we also saw one of its limitations when we directly referenced an instance of a microservice. To address this, we used the Vert.x event bus and saw how message-based microservices let you build reactive microservices and thus reactive systems.

Of course, one microservice does not make an application. They come in systems. To build systems, we have to use ...