Microservice Architecture

Chapter 5. Service Design

As discussed in Chapter 3, one of the key elements—the one most everyone thinks of when we talk about microservice architecture—is the design of the actual microservice components themselves. It is these autonomous services that make up the fabric of our microservice system and do the actual work of implementing your solution strategy. Implementing systems that contain a large number of small service components is a challenge so we’ll devote an entire chapter to a set of tools and processes that can help you and your team take on the task.

In our experience working with various organizations and interviewing others, some of the more challenging questions that teams adopting microservice architecture face are how to properly size microservices (“how micro is micro?”) and how to properly deal with data persistence in order to avoid sharing of data across services. These two concerns are actually closely related. A mistake in optimal sizing often begets the extraneous data-sharing problem, but the latter is especially problematic, operationally, since it can create tight cross-service coupling and impede independent deployability, a core value of the architectural style. Other topics that come up frequently when we talk with people who are designing and implementing microservices are things like support for asynchronous messaging, transaction modeling, and dealing with dependencies in a microservice environment. Getting a handle on these elements will help ...