← All Concepts
Architecture
Microservices Architecture
An architectural pattern where an application is composed of small, independent services that communicate over well-defined APIs.
**Microservices** decompose a monolith into independently deployable services, each owning its own data and business logic.
**Principles:**
- **Single responsibility**: Each service does one thing well
- **Independent deployment**: Deploy one service without affecting others
- **Own data**: Each service has its own database
- **API contracts**: Services communicate via well-defined APIs
- **Decentralized governance**: Teams choose their own tech stack
**Communication patterns:**
- **Synchronous**: REST, gRPC (request-response)
- **Asynchronous**: Message queues, event streaming (event-driven)
**Challenges:**
- Distributed transactions (Saga pattern)
- Service discovery
- Data consistency across services
- Debugging across service boundaries (distributed tracing)
- Network latency and failures
**When to use monolith instead:** Early-stage products, small teams, simple domains.
Common Use Cases
- Large-scale applications with many independent teams
- Systems requiring independent scaling of components
- Polyglot environments (different languages per service)
- Frequent independent deployments
Advantages
- +Independent deployment and scaling
- +Technology flexibility per service
- +Team autonomy and parallel development
- +Fault isolation (one service failure doesn't crash all)
Disadvantages
- -Distributed system complexity (network failures, latency)
- -Data consistency challenges across services
- -Operational overhead (monitoring, deployment, debugging)
- -Over-engineering risk for small applications