If service clients want to interact with entities, such as investors, and their stocks without needing them to manage a compound identifier for both investor and stock, we need a pattern called entity endpoint. Entity endpoints suggest exposing each entity as individual lightweight endpoints of the service they reside in, so the service consumers get the global addressability of service entities:

The preceding screenshot illustrates how a service consumer can access individual entity endpoints instead of service endpoints. The entity endpoints expose reusable enterprise resources, so service consumers can reuse and share the entity resources.

Our rest service, the investor service, exposes a couple of entity endpoints, such as /investors/investorId, and investor/stockId , and they are few examples of entity endpoints that our service consumer can reuse and standardize.