Part 1. Introducing Microservice APIs

Microservices are an architectural style in which components of a system are designed as standalone and independently deployable applications. The concept of microservices has been around since the early 2000s, and since the 2010s it has gained in popularity. Nowadays, microservices are a popular choice for building modern websites. As you’ll learn in chapter 1, microservices allow you to leverage the power of distributed applications, scale components more easily, and release faster.

However, for all their benefits, microservices also come with challenges of their own. They bring a substantial infrastructure overhead, and they’re more difficult to monitor, operate, and trace. When working with microservices, the first challenge is to get their design right, and in chapter 3 you’ll learn several principles and strategies that will help you build robust microservices.

Microservices collaborate through APIs, and in this book, you’ll learn to design and build REST and GraphQL APIs for your microservices. Chapter 2 gives you a taste of building a REST API, and in the second part of this book, you’ll learn additional patterns and principles to build robust REST APIs. The most challenging aspect of working with APIs is ensuring that both the API client and the API server follow the API specification, and in chapter 1 you’ll learn about documentation-driven development and the importance of starting the API journey with a good and well-documented design.

The first part of this book teaches you foundational patterns and principles for building microservices and driving their integrations with APIs. In the rest of this book, we build on top of the concepts introduced here, and you’ll learn how to build robust APIs, how to test them, how to protect them, and how to deploy your microservice APIs to the cloud. Our intrepid journey is just about to begin!