Migrating to Microservice Databases

Chapter 1. Introduction

Microservices certainly aren’t a panacea, but they’re a good solution if you have the right problem. And each solution also comes with its own set of problems. Most of the attention when approaching the microservice solution is focused on the architecture around the code artifacts, but no application lives without its data. And when distributing data between different microservices, we have the challenge of integrating them.

In the sections that follow, we’ll explore some of the reasons you might want to consider microservices for your application. If you understand why you need them, we’ll be able to help you figure out how to distribute and integrate your persistent data in relational databases.

The Feedback Loop

The feedback loop is one of the most important processes in human development. We need to constantly assess the way that we do things to ensure that we’re on the right track. Even the classic Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) process is a variation of the feedback loop.

In software—as with everything we do in life—the longer the feedback loop, the worse the results are. And this happens because we have a limited amount of capacity for holding information in our brains, both in terms of volume and duration.

Remember the old days when all we had as a tool to code was a text editor with black background and green fonts? We needed to compile our code to check if the syntax was correct. Sometimes the compilation took minutes, and when it was finished we already ...