Microservice Architecture

Independent, deployable services aligned to business domains, communicating via APIs, events, or streams.

Architecture Diagram

Microservice ArchitectureIndependent services communicating via APIs and events, each owning its data and deployment.API GatewayRouting, Auth, Rate LimitingUser Service• Registration• Authentication• Profile MgmtOrder Service• Order Processing• State Management• Business LogicPayment Service• Payment Processing• Fraud Detection• RefundsNotification Service• Email• SMS• PushEvent Bus / Message QueueUser DBPostgreSQLOrder DBMongoDBPayment DBPostgreSQLNotification CacheRedisKey Benefits:• Independent deployment & scaling• Technology diversity per serviceCommunication:• Synchronous: HTTP/gRPC• Asynchronous: Events/Messages

Enabled By Platform Building Blocks

  • Messaging & Streaming Platform: Provides secure, observable messaging and streaming infrastructure to enable event-driven patterns, decouple services, support async workflows, and ensure enterprise-grade reliability.
  • API Management: Securely exposes APIs, enforces policies, manages discoverability, and enables AI agent integration.
  • Internal Developer Platform: Enables self-service deployments, golden paths, and faster delivery cycles.
  • Observability & Operations: Provides visibility, SLOs, and resilience validation across architectures.

What it is

A distributed style decomposing systems into small services owned by autonomous teams, enabling independent releases and scaling.

Responsibilities

  • Each service owns its data and contracts
  • Resilience patterns: retries, timeouts, circuit breakers
  • Observability and platform guardrails

Patterns

  • Domain-driven boundaries
  • Saga and outbox for consistency
  • BFF for tailored client APIs
  • Service mesh for zero trust

Trade-offs

  • Operational complexity and higher cognitive load
  • Distributed systems failure modes
  • Testing and data consistency become harder

When to use

  • Complex, evolving domains with many teams
  • Need for independent scaling and releases
  • Strong platform engineering in place