Developing Reactive Microservices

Chapter 3. Implementing Reactive Microservices in Java

Getting just what you need is more valuable than getting lots of something.

Martin Elwin, on the meaning of the Swedish word “Lagom” at Monikgras 2015

When people talk about microservices, they focus on the “micro” part, saying that a service should be small. I want to emphasize that the important thing to consider when splitting a system into services is to find the right boundaries between services, aligning them with bounded contexts, business capabilities, and isolation requirements. As a result, a microservices-based system can achieve its scalability and resilience requirements, making it easy to deploy and manage.

This report uses the new Lagom framework to build a reactive microservices system. Lagom (pronounced [ˈlɑ̀ːɡɔm]) is a Swedish word meaning “just the right amount.” This clearly expresses the focus of the framework on having services that are just the right size. It offers four main features:

• A Service API that provides a way to declare and implement service interfaces, to be consumed by clients. For location transparency, clients use stable addresses and discover services through a service locator. The Service API supports synchronous request-response calls as well as asynchronous messaging and streaming between services.

• The Persistence API provides event-sourced persistent entities for services that store data, with CQRS read-side support for queries. It manages the distribution of persisted entities ...