Service communication
Service communication is the exchange of requests, responses, messages, or data between distinct services across process or network boundaries.
Platform Engineering on Kubernetes
A service-to-service interaction is communication in which one independently deployable service requests or sends data to another service.
- How it is used
- Coordinates requests and data exchange between independently deployable services while addressing failure handling and platform consistency.
- How deep it goes
- Explains retries, exponential backoff, sidecars, component configuration, and platform policies, but does not standardize behavior across all technology stacks.
- Examples
- Uses Spring Retry, go-retryablehttp, Dapr sidecars, and Conference services communicating through invocation APIs.
- What you can do after
- Apply it via Dapr Service Invocation APIs and configure uniform resiliency policies without changing application code.
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gRPC Microservices in Go
Service-to-service communication is the exchange of requests and responses between application services.
- How it is used
- Connects independently deployable services so they can exchange messages while preserving attention to reliability and data consistency.
- How deep it goes
- Explains the gRPC and Protocol Buffers approach and identifies resilience concerns without detailing their implementations here.
- Examples
- Uses a Python Checkout client calling a Java Payment service and contrasts internal gRPC with browser-facing REST.
- What you can do after
- Evaluate gRPC for internal calls against browser compatibility and maintenance costs, then plan for resilient, observable operation.
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Bootstrapping Microservices, Second Edition: With Docker, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions, and Terraform
The network interaction through which independently deployed microservices exchange information and coordinate behavior.
- How it is used
- Coordinates independently responsible microservices so they can collaborate on higher-level application features.
- How deep it goes
- Explains direct and indirect messaging with HTTP and RabbitMQ, but defers improved service-readiness handling to later treatment.
- Examples
- Uses video-streaming, video-storage, and history microservices to demonstrate direct requests and streams of messages.
- What you can do after
- Evaluate whether HTTP or RabbitMQ better fits a coordination or decoupling requirement.
Related concepts
- microservice architectureused by · Microservice architecture is a software architectural style that organizes an application as independently deployable services with focused responsibilities that communicate through defined interfaces.
- direct messaginghas part · Direct messaging is synchronous communication in which one microservice sends a message directly to a specifically addressed other microservice and receives an immediate handling result.
- Apache Kafkaused by · Apache Kafka is a distributed event-streaming platform for publishing, storing, processing, and consuming streams of records.
- network traffickind of · Network traffic is the flow or volume of data, including packets and requests, exchanged across a computer network over time.
- request-response APIused by · A request-response API is an interaction pattern in which a requester sends a request to a provider and receives a corresponding response.
- HTTPuses · HTTP is a standardized application-layer protocol that defines request-and-response messages for transferring resource representations between networked systems.
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