Chapter 13. Discovering services

Have you ever watched Finding Nemo? In that movie, Marlin (a clown fish) and Dory (a blue tang fish) are trying to get to Sydney, Australia to find Marlin’s missing son, Nemo. Along the way, they encounter a school of moonfish. For fun, the moonfish arrange themselves into several shapes—a swordfish, an octopus, and they even mock Marlin by arranging themselves to look like him. When Dory asks them if they know how to get to Sydney, they form the shape of the Sydney Opera House and then change into an arrow pointing toward the east Australian current.

Although the movie doesn’t delve into the lives of any particular moonfish, it can be assumed that each of them is an individual, independent of the other moonfish. Each has its own scales, fins, gills, eyes, internal organs, and (as far as we know) their own hopes and dreams. Even so, they still work together to form those fun shapes and help Marlin and Dory make their way to Australia.

This chapter is the first of a handful of chapters that discuss how to develop applications that are composed of moonfish. That is, you’ll see how to develop with microservices—small, independent applications that work together to provide the functionality of a complete application.

13.1. Thinking in microservices

13.2. Setting up a service registry

13.3. Registering and discovering services

Summary