Granularity and Communication in Microservice Architectures

When teams adopt microservices with an understanding the structure of the architecture, but not of how to get all the pieces to communicate, it is all too easy to accidentally create a distributed Big Ball of Mud.  Neal introduces a new measure, the architecture quantum, to help analyze and identify communication boundaries and define static and dynamic coupling. Then, the session provides tools--integrators and disintegrators--to help architects iterate towards the correct granularity for their microservices for static coupling. Next, for dynamic coupling, architects must understand when to choose synchronous versus asynchronous communication between services, consistency, and coordination to ultimately analyze transactional sagas; this talk describe eight possible sagas and when each is applicable.