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Microservices Patterns

How to organize and operate dozens of services — bounded contexts, service discovery, API gateways, BFFs, service mesh, event sourcing, CQRS, and deployment resilience. Assumes Communication (wire protocols) and complements Distributed Systems (correctness primitives). Gateway and mesh material moved here from Communication Deep Cuts.

Time budget: ≈29h

How to use this reference

  • Work through topics top to bottom — mesh and gateway assume discovery concepts; event sourcing assumes async integration from Communication.
  • Communication owns REST/gRPC/WebSocket protocols; Networking owns TCP/TLS/LB; this track owns platform assembly.
  • Topic 7 (Deep Cuts) — multi-region topology, zero-trust service auth, Backstage catalog, advanced multi-cluster mesh.

The Reference

  1. 1

    Service boundaries, monolith vs microservices trade-offs, and managed-vs-self-hosted cloud decisions for system design.

    1. 1.1Decomposition & Bounded Contexts3/535m
    2. 1.2Monolith vs Microservices Trade-offs3/530m
    3. 1.3Managed Services & Cloud Trade-offs3/530m
  2. 2

    How services find each other — registries, DNS, health checks, and client-side load balancing.

    1. 2.1Discovery & Registration Patterns3/535m
    2. 2.2Health Checks & Client-Side LB3/530m
  3. 3

    North-south edge — TLS, auth, routing, rate limits, and client-specific backends.

    1. 3.1API Gateway & Edge Patterns4/535m
    2. 3.2BFF & Aggregation Patterns3/535m
  4. 4

    Sidecars, mTLS, traffic management, and uniform resilience between services.

    1. 4.1Mesh Fundamentals & mTLS4/535m
    2. 4.2Traffic Management & Mesh Observability4/530m
  5. 5

    Event logs as source of truth and separate read/write models for scale and audit.

    1. 5.1Event Sourcing Fundamentals4/535m
    2. 5.2CQRS & Read Model Projections4/535m
  6. 6

    Rollouts, traffic shifting, bulkheads, and chaos at platform scale.

    1. 6.1Canary, Blue-Green & Rollouts3/530m
    2. 6.2Bulkheads, Circuit Breakers & Chaos4/530m
  7. 7

    Multi-region topology, zero-trust service auth, service catalog, and advanced mesh.

    1. 7.1Multi-Region Service Topology5/535m
    2. 7.2Zero-Trust & Service-to-Service Auth4/530m
    3. 7.3Service Catalog & Developer Portals3/525m
    4. 7.4Advanced Mesh & Multi-Cluster5/530m