5 Communication between microservices
This chapter covers:
- Using live reload at the application level for faster iterations
- Sending direct messages between microservices with HTTP requests
- Sending indirect messages between microservices with RabbitMQ
- Choosing between using direct and indirect messages
A microservices application is composed of many microservices with each looking after its own area of responsibility. Each microservice by itself is small, simple and doesn’t do much, so 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 very much.
In this chapter, we examine the different ways that microservices can communicate so that they 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.