philippta / microservices.md

About 6 years ago when I was a PHP ecommerce dev, I've always wanted to work with distributed systems and microservices. They seemed so cool and the new way of architecting software systems because all of big tech did it. But now working with them day to day for about 3 years I came to realize that my initial anticipation was stupid. Well, not stupid in the traditional sense, because how could I have known what I'd get myself into.

The first thing you've probably heared about microservices is, that they scale very well. Since you have many of them you can precisely dial the knob, that deploys more of the thing, that handles some piece of your system. Or in more concrete terms. If you have a bunch more people trying to order something, you can scale up the order service.

Microservices usually don't live in isolation. There's always another service talking to it and it will talk to others. Whether that's through an HTTP, RPC, or a message bus. You might as well call messages "events" or "commands" but that doesn't really matter. It always invokes some kind of other process.

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