Chapter 3. Interprocess communication in a microservice architecture
This chapter covers
- Applying the communication patterns: Remote procedure invocation, Circuit breaker, Client-side discovery, Self registration, Server-side discovery, Third party registration, Asynchronous messaging, Transactional outbox, Transaction log tailing, Polling publisher
- The importance of interprocess communication in a microservice architecture
- Defining and evolving APIs
- The various interprocess communication options and their trade-offs
- The benefits of services that communicate using asynchronous messaging
- Reliably sending messages as part of a database transaction
Mary and her team, like most other developers, had some experience with interprocess communication (IPC) mechanisms. The FTGO application has a REST API that’s used by mobile applications and browser-side JavaScript. It also uses various cloud services, such as the Twilio messaging service and the Stripe payment service. But within a monolithic application like FTGO, modules invoke one another via language-level method or function calls. FTGO developers generally don’t need to think about IPC unless they’re working on the REST API or the modules that integrate with cloud services.