In this chapter, we took a look at how we can work with the microservices architecture and how it differs from the traditional monolithic way of developing enterprise applications. We then took a look at the advantages that come as we move toward the microservice development approach and learned about the guidelines that we can follow to make our journey toward microservices smoother.

Once we had an idea about the basics of microservices, we went on to take a look at how SLAs guarantee us a certain desired set of functionalities between the services and how they act as a contract so as to support a smooth service by the application. We then moved on to a hands-on exercise by writing a simple to-do list management application utilizing microservices.

Once we completed the development of our sample application, we looked at how the manual way of maintaining configuration files to discover services may not work with a microservices architecture, so we took a deep dive into the topics of service discovery and how it can help us in the microservices world of application development. We then moved on to learn about the API gateways and how they can prove to be of use when deploying microservices in production. Finally, we learned how to establish asynchronous communication between these microservices.

With the whole application now divided into small microservices, we now need to understand how these services can be tested and how we can trace the flow of the calls inside these small services that run on our infrastructure in order to analyze how things are working and find out where things are going wrong. The next chapter takes us through the process of testing and tracing in a microservice architecture.