A microservices application is composed of many microservices, each looking after its own area of responsibility. Because each microservice by itself is small, simple, and doesn’t do much, our microservices must collaborate to create the complex behaviors needed to implement our application’s feature set. To work together, our microservices need ways to communicate. If they can’t talk to each other, then they won’t be able to coordinate their activities, and they won’t achieve much.
In this chapter, we examine the different ways that microservices can communicate so that these can collaborate and fulfill the higher-level requirements of the application. In the process, we’ll also revisit Docker and Docker Compose to set up live reload for our entire application. Moving forward, that’s essential so that we aren’t constantly rebuilding and restarting our application as we update our code.