Practical Microservices

MVC and CRUD make software easier to write, but harder to change. Microservice-based architectures can help even the smallest of projects remain agile in the long term, but most tutorials meander in theory or completely miss the point of what it means to be microservice-based. Roll up your sleeves with real projects and learn the most important concepts of evented architectures. You'll have your own deployable, testable project and a direction for where to go next.

Much ink has been spilled on the topic of microservices, but all of this writing fails to accurately identity what makes a system a monolith, define what microservices are, or give complete, practical examples, so you're probably left thinking they have nothing to offer you. You don't have to be at Google or Facebook scale to benefit from a microservice-based architecture. Microservices will keep even small and medium teams productive by keeping the pieces of your system focused and decoupled.

Discover the basics of message-based architectures, render the same state in different shapes to fit the task at hand, and learn what it is that makes something a monolith (it has nothing to do with how many machines you deploy to). Conserve resources by performing background jobs with microservices. Deploy specialized microservices for registration, authentication, payment processing, e-mail, and more. Tune your services by defining appropriate service boundaries. Deploy your services effectively for continuous integration. Master debugging techniques that work across different services. You'll finish with a deployable system and skills you can apply to your current project.

Add the responsiveness and flexibility of microservices to your project, no matter what the size or complexity.

What You Need:

While the principles of this book transcend programming language, the code examples are in Node.js because JavaScript, for better or worse, is widely read. You'll use PostgreSQL for data storage, so familiarity with it is a plus. The books does provide Docker images to make working with PostgreSQL a bit easier, but extensive Docker knowledge is not required.

Ethan's love of computer programming began at age 4 when his dad taught him to make the family TI-99/4A beep. For the past 12 years Ethan has worked professionally up and down the abstraction hierarchy, from junior developer up to platform architect, finally settling into microservice-based architectures for the past 3 years.