Understanding Microservices
Microservices architecture decomposes a system into small, autonomous services. Each service owns its own data and logic, and communicates with others via APIs or messaging.
“Microservices scale teams, not just code. But with freedom comes responsibility.”
— Viswa
— Viswa
Key Principles
- Single Responsibility: Each service handles one business capability.
- Independent Deployability: Services can be updated without redeploying the entire system.
- Decentralized Data: Services manage their own databases or storage.
- Communication via APIs or messaging queues (async or sync).
Pros & Cons
- Pros: Scalable, resilient, enables independent team ownership, easier to adopt new tech per service.
- Cons: Complex operational overhead, distributed system challenges, testing and monitoring more difficult.
Real-World Examples
- Large e-commerce platforms (Amazon, Shopify) where catalog, payments, and orders are separate services.
- Streaming platforms (Netflix, Spotify) with independent services for recommendation, playback, and billing.
- Banking or fintech apps with services for accounts, transactions, and authentication.
Common Failure Modes
- Services tightly coupled via shared databases or synchronous calls.
- Team miscoordination leading to inconsistent APIs.
- Insufficient observability causing slow detection of failures.
- Deployment sprawl and unmaintained services over time.
When to Use
- Large teams needing independent ownership of features.
- Systems that must scale rapidly in both traffic and complexity.
- When modular monoliths become hard to maintain or slow to deploy.