Microservice communication, role-based repos and tools…

Here we go again,

welcome to all new subscribers! I am happy to see this group of wonderful people in tech is constantly growing. As always, I am happy to learn about your feedback via twitter/__florian.

Microservice communication patterns

So you decided to go with microservices for your project, start building small independent services in your preferred language and tools. But one of the biggest challenges is waiting for you, in the darkest corner of your configuration files: Inter-service communication. Last week’s newsletter linked to an article by the .net team, but this week I want to talk about two more sophisticated protocols, that are worth learning about.

GRIT is a system for distributes transactions in microservices, made by the eBay technology team. I don’t want to butcher it by trying to make a compressed description of what it does here, because the actual article about it, is pretty concise.

Another interesting library to help with inter-service communication is called dapr. This one will help you to “talk” to any other service in your system, by making a simple HTTP call to a designated URL. Even your databases are addressed through dapr’s sidecar, so that your service is truly decoupled from hardcoded dependencies. So in a way it is very comparable to a system like Consul.

Monorepo or Multirepo? Role-Based Repositories by Pavel Shirshov

In many modern day projects, you will face the challenge of how to organizing your codebase in your VCS. The most common patterns are monorepo and multirepo, both of which come with their own set of challenges (you can find pros and cons in his article). Because both setups are not optimal, Pavel describes a new approach (which is right now a fictional setup) of having role based repositories (or a system that can assemble repositories for roles on demand). It is a nice starting point for thinking about how you want to structure your (large) codebase.

An Illustrated Guide to Some Useful Command Line Tools by Wesley Moore

We all have our favorite tools, and this article just provides you with a wonderful list of 26 command line tools, that are worth checking out. JQ and MDCAT are my favorites here.

So, this is it for this week. Thank you for reading and don’t forget to tell me about a) things you want to read about in the future and b) cool stuff you found!

Have a wonderful Sunday, Florian

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