2 Creating your first microservice

Our goal for this book is to assemble an application that consists of multiple microservices. But before we can build multiple microservices, we must first learn how to build a single microservice. In this chapter, we’ll create our first microservice. This simple microservice does very little, but it illustrates the process so that you can understand it and repeat it. Indeed, this is the process we’ll use to create multiple microservices through the course of this book.

This first microservice is a simple HTTP server that delivers streaming video to a user watching in a web browser. This is the first step on our road to building FlixTube, our video-streaming application. Video streaming might sound difficult, but the simple code we examine at this stage shouldn’t present much trouble.

In this book, our microservices are programmed with JavaScript and run on Node.js, but note that we could use any tech stack for our microservices. Building applications with microservices gives us a lot of freedom in the tech stack we use.

2.1 New tools

2.2 Getting the code

2.3 Why Node.js?

2.4 Our philosophy of development

2.5 Establishing our single-service development environment

2.5.1 Installing Git

2.5.2 Cloning the code repository

2.5.3 Getting VS Code

2.5.4 Installing Node.js

Summary