12 Microservices Patterns I Wish I Knew Before the System Design Interview

12 Microservices Patterns I Wish I Knew Before the System Design Interview

  1. Service Decomposition: Break down your application into smaller, independent services. Each service should have a well-defined responsibility, making it easier to manage, scale, and deploy.

  2. API Gateway: Implement an API Gateway to provide a unified entry point for clients. This pattern enables you to manage authentication, rate limiting, and routing in a centralized manner.

  3. Service Discovery: Use a service discovery mechanism to locate and communicate with services dynamically. This pattern ensures that services can find each other without hard-coded references.

  4. Load Balancing: Distribute incoming requests across multiple instances of a service to ensure optimal resource utilization and prevent overloading any single instance.

  5. Circuit Breaker: Implement a circuit breaker pattern to prevent cascading failures. This involves detecting when a service is failing and temporarily blocking requests to it to avoid overloading the system.

  6. Event Sourcing: Store changes to the system's state as a sequence of events. This pattern helps maintain an audit trail, supports debugging, and enables rebuilding the system state at any point.

  7. CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation): Separate the read and write responsibilities of your application. This pattern optimizes query performance, scalability, and maintenance by allowing different models for reading and writing data.

  8. Saga Pattern: Manage distributed transactions across multiple services by implementing a saga. This pattern ensures consistency and rollback in case of failures during complex operations.

  9. Database per Service: Associate each microservice with its own database to achieve service autonomy. However, ensure that you handle data consistency and synchronization challenges between services.

  10. Asynchronous Communication: Utilize messaging queues for asynchronous communication between services. This pattern enhances scalability and fault tolerance, as services can continue working even if others are temporarily unreachable.

  11. Bulkhead Pattern: Isolate different components of your system to prevent failures in one component from affecting others. This pattern enhances resilience and ensures that failures are contained.

  12. Containerization and Orchestration: Use containers (e.g., Docker) to package services and their dependencies. Employ orchestration tools (e.g., Kubernetes) to automate deployment, scaling, and management of containerized services.