Designing Distributed Systems, 2nd Edition

Part III. Serving Patterns

Chapter 5 described patterns for grouping collections of containers that are scheduled on the same machine. These groups are tightly coupled, symbiotic systems. They depend on local, shared resources like disk, network interface, or inter-process communications. Such collections of containers are important patterns, but they are also building blocks for larger systems. Reliability, scalability, and separation of concerns dictate that real-world systems are built out of many different components, spread across multiple machines. In contrast to single-node patterns, the multinode distributed patterns are more loosely coupled. While the patterns dictate patterns of communication between the components, this communication is based on network calls. Furthermore, many calls are issued in parallel, and systems coordinate via loose synchronization rather than tight constraints.

Recently, the term microservices has become a common term for describing multinode distributed software architectures. Microservices describe a system built out of many different components running in different processes and communicating over defined APIs. Microservices stand in contrast to monolithic systems, which tend to place all of the functionality for a service within a single, tightly coordinated application. These two different architectural approaches are shown in Figures III-1 and III-2.

Figure III-1. A monolithic service with all functions in a single container

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