What is Microservices?
Microservices trade internal complexity (one large codebase) for distributed complexity (many small ones that must coordinate). The trade is worthwhile when teams need independent cadence and clear ownership — and punishing when a distributed system is built without the operational maturity to run it.
Related terms
- API Contract — A formal specification of an API (OpenAPI, gRPC proto, GraphQL schema) that producers and consumers agree to uphold.
- Event Channel — A named, typed stream of events (often Kafka topic or equivalent) through which services publish and subscribe asynchronously.
- Service Mesh — A dedicated infrastructure layer for handling service-to-service communication, typically via sidecar proxies.