Microservices
Service communication, resilience, data ownership, and operations
Prepare for microservices architecture interview questions on service decomposition, inter-service communication, distributed transactions, circuit breakers, API gateways, service discovery, and deployment strategies including containerization and orchestration.
Communication3 topics
Service Discovery
Let services find each other dynamically without hard-coded hostnames — so instances can scale and move freely.
API Gateway
A single ingress for clients — routing, auth, rate limiting, response shaping — in front of N internal services.
Service Mesh
Push cross-cutting concerns (retries, mTLS, traffic shifting, observability) into a sidecar proxy so application code stays focused on business logic.
Resilience3 topics
Circuit Breakers
Stop hammering a failing downstream — fail fast for a window — so a slow dependency doesn't cascade into your own outage.
Retries, Timeouts & Backoff
Recover from transient failures via retry — but never without a timeout, exponential backoff, jitter, and an attempt cap.
Bulkheads & Backpressure
Isolate failures within bounded resource pools so a noisy neighbor can't starve everyone else.
Data3 topics
Database per Service
Each service owns its data and database; other services only touch it through the owner's API or events.
Saga Pattern
Maintain consistency across services without distributed transactions by chaining local transactions plus compensating actions on failure.
CQRS & Event Sourcing
Separate the write model (commands) from the read model (queries) — each shaped for its workload. Optionally store every state change as an immutable event (event sourcing).
Operations3 topics
Distributed Tracing
Follow a single user request across many services and see where time is actually spent.
Centralized Configuration
Manage config for all services in one place (with versioning, audit, per-env overrides) — instead of redeploying every service to change a value.
Deployment Strategies
Ship new versions safely — blue-green, canary, rolling, feature-flagged — depending on risk tolerance and the cost of a bad release.