Microservices are one of the hottest trends to emerge in the IT world during the last few years. It is relatively easy to identify the most important reasons for their growing popularity. Both their advantages and disadvantages are well known, although what we describe as disadvantages can be easily solved using the right tools. The advantages that they offer include scalability, flexibility, and independent delivery; these are the reasons for its rapidly growing popularity. There are a few earlier IT trends that had some influence over this growth in the popularity of microservices. I'm referring to trends such as the usage of common cloud-based environments and the migration from relational databases to NoSQL.
Before discussing this at length, let's see the topics we will cover in this chapter:
- Cloud-native development with Spring Cloud
- The most important elements in microservices-based architecture
- Models of interservice communication
- Introduction to circuit breakers and fallback patterns
