Microservice architectures and distributed systems naturally require communication that involves more than a single, monolithic application. There are many ways how to implement communication with Java EE, depending on the chosen protocols and communication technologies.

There are some aspects to be considered when realizing communication. External applications that take part of the microservice system, for example, require discovering the service instances. In order to not tightly couple applications and configuration, looking up services should be dynamic, rather than configuring static hosts or IP addresses.

The cloud native principle of being resilient also concerns communication. Since networks can potentially fail anytime, application health should not be impacted when connectivity decelerates or goes down. The application should guard itself from potential errors propagating into the application.