Principled Microservices Playbook

Microservices aren’t a toolset; they’re a philosophy—one that charges interest.

Skip the tool catalogs. This playbook nails the decisions that hard-wire success—or failure—before a single commit exists.

This journey isn’t for the faint-of-heart; distributed systems repay in brutal lessons and outsized rewards.

By the final page you won’t just recite patterns—you’ll think in them. That mindset is what builds tomorrow’s systems.

The Starting Point: Before You Begin

The most critical architectural decision is not choosing a technology, but committing to a new operational reality. This foundational article is the strategic gatekeeper, guiding you through the trade-offs to determine if the MSA path is right for you at all.

• Monolith vs. MSA? Stop Asking “Which,” Start Asking “Why.”
  • A framework for making the single most important architectural decision, based on your team, business, and operational maturity.

Part 1: The Price of Distribution

This part dissects the true costs of going distributed and establishes the core principles for breaking down a system based on business reality, not just technical diagrams.

• The Two-Pizza Team Myth: The True Cost of Microservices
  • A brutally honest look at the hidden taxes—Network, Data, and Operations—that you must be prepared to pay.
• Monolith Decomposition: Business-First Boundaries, Microservices Second
  • Learn the art and science of splitting your system based on business capabilities. This is the blueprint for your architecture.

Part 2: The Great Migration

This part builds a practical bridge from the old world of the monolith to the new world of microservices.

• Modernization
• Data Transition

Part 3: The Language of Services: Communication Architecture

Once services are separated, they must communicate. This part explores the fundamental patterns that govern their interaction.

• EDA
• Message Queue

Part 4: Data in a Distributed World: The Fight for Consistency

Here we tackle the hardest problem in distributed systems: data. This part provides a playbook for managing business transactions and maintaining data integrity in a world without ACID guarantees.

• Database
• Distributed Transaction
• Outbox Pattern
• CQRS
• Event Sourcing
• Saga Pattern
• View

Part 5: Guarding the Gates: Managing Access and Security

A distributed system requires a well-defended front door. This part focuses on the patterns for managing and securing all incoming traffic.

• API Gateway
• Auth

Part 6: The Art of Survival: Resilience & Observability

Distributed systems fail—it’s a matter of when, not if. This part provides the essential patterns for building resilient services and the observability tools needed to diagnose problems when they occur.

• Distributed Systems
• Resilient Systems
• Distributed Tracing
• Centralized Logging & Metrics

Part 7: The Service Grid: Advanced Traffic Control

This part covers the advanced topic of Service Mesh, which externalizes complex communication logic from your application to the infrastructure layer.

• Service Mesh
• Istio

Part 8: Making It Real: Deployment, Scaling, and Culture

This part covers the final, crucial pieces of the puzzle: the tools and culture required to run a microservices architecture in production.

• DevOps
• Containers & Orchestration
• CI/CD

This handbook is a living document. New chapters will be added and existing ones will be refined over time. Stay tuned.