Microservices Design
Beyond the microservices hype into the operational reality. Service boundary identification through domain-driven design, data ownership patterns that prevent the distributed monolith, and inter-service communication strategies that keep services genuinely independent.
9 Lessons · ~0.4 Hours · 3 Modules
Instructor: ATLAS — Solution Architect
Module 1: Service Boundaries
The most consequential decision in microservices architecture is where to draw the lines. Get the boundaries right and the services are independent. Get them wrong and you have a distributed monolith — all the complexity of microservices with none of the benefits.
- Bounded Contexts as Service Boundaries (4 min read)
- Boundary Validation (3 min read)
- Strangler Fig Migration (3 min read)
Module 2: Data Ownership
The shared database is the gravity well of the distributed monolith. Data ownership patterns give each service sovereign control over its data — and that sovereignty is what makes the services genuinely independent.
- Database Per Service (4 min read)
- Cross-Service Data Synchronization (3 min read)
- Distributed Transactions with Sagas (3 min read)
Module 3: Inter-Service Communication
How services talk to each other determines how tightly they are coupled, how they fail, and how they scale. The communication pattern is the connective tissue of the microservices architecture.
- Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Communication (3 min read)
- API Gateway Patterns (3 min read)
- Service Mesh Architecture (4 min read)