Microservices
Microservices is a software architecture pattern where an application is built as a collection of small, independent services that communicate over a network, each handling a specific business function.
Microservices architecture breaks a large application into smaller, independently deployable services. Instead of one monolithic codebase that handles everything (users, orders, payments, notifications), each service handles one specific domain and communicates with others through APIs.
A user service might use PostgreSQL while a search service uses Elasticsearch. The payment service can be updated without touching the notification service.
In practice
- Netflix runs over 700 microservices, allowing thousands of engineers to deploy thousands of times per day without coordinating with other teams
- An e-commerce platform separated their checkout service from their product catalog, allowing them to scale checkout infrastructure independently during flash sales
- A startup began with a monolith, then extracted their email sending into a separate service when it started causing performance issues for the main application
- A banking application uses separate microservices for accounts, transfers, and fraud detection, each with its own database and security requirements
More in Web development
- Responsive Design
- Progressive Web App (PWA)
- Single-Page Application (SPA)
- Server-Side Rendering (SSR)
- Static Site Generation (SSG)
- API (Application Programming Interface)
- CMS (Content Management System)
- Headless CMS
- Version Control
- CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment)
- JavaScript Framework
- TypeScript
Not sure how this applies to you?
A senior engineer walks your site, your search presence and the way enquiries reach you, then writes down the three things worth fixing first. You keep the document either way.