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Microservices
Architecture Style
Microservice Architecture
Structure your app as a set of small, independently deployable services — each owning its domain.
Intent & Description
Real-world Use Case
10 teams at a fintech ship independently to prod dozens of times per day. Payments team deploys a new fee engine without touching Auth or Notifications. Each service scales based on its own load.
Source
📌 TL;DR
Microservices = small services, autonomous teams, independent deploys. Pay with distributed systems complexity. Worth it at scale, overkill for small teams.
Advantages
- Independent deployments — one team’s release doesn’t block others
- Fine-grained scaling — scale only the services under load
- Tech stack freedom per service
- Fault isolation — one service crashing doesn’t take down everything
- Small, understandable codebases per service
Disadvantages
- Distributed systems complexity — networking, latency, partial failures
- Cross-service transactions need Saga (no ACID)
- Operational overhead — N services = N deployments, logs, monitoring setups
- Service discovery, load balancing, tracing all need infra investment
- Wrong service boundaries = distributed monolith (worst of both worlds)