When should I use microservices?

Consider when: multiple teams need to work independently, different components need different scaling, you need technology flexibility, or you're at significant scale. For small teams/projects, monoliths are often better.

How small should a microservice be?

No magic number. Guidelines: single business capability, can be owned by one small team, can be understood by a new developer quickly. "Micro" doesn't mean tiny - avoid nano-services.

How do microservices communicate?

Synchronous (REST, gRPC) for request-response. Asynchronous (queues, events) for fire-and-forget or eventual consistency. Choose based on coupling, consistency, and performance needs.

What about data consistency across services?

Embrace eventual consistency where possible. Use sagas for distributed transactions. Design for idempotency. Accept that strong consistency across services is expensive and often unnecessary.

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Microservices

An architectural style where applications are composed of small, independent services that communicate over network protocols.

In-Depth Explanation

Microservices architecture structures an application as a collection of loosely coupled, independently deployable services. Each service handles a specific business capability and can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently.

Microservices characteristics:

Single responsibility: Each service does one thing well
Independent deployment: Deploy services without affecting others
Decentralised data: Each service owns its data
Technology flexibility: Different services can use different stacks
Resilience: Failure in one service doesn't crash others

Benefits:

Independent scaling
Faster deployment cycles
Team autonomy
Technology flexibility
Fault isolation

Challenges:

Distributed system complexity
Network latency and reliability
Data consistency across services
Operational overhead
Testing complexity

Communication patterns:

Synchronous: REST, gRPC
Asynchronous: Message queues, events

Business Context

Microservices enable large organisations to move faster with independent teams and services, but add complexity that smaller organisations may not need.

How Clever Ops Uses This

We design appropriate architectures for Australian businesses - microservices when scale and team structure warrant, simpler architectures when they don't.

Example Use Case

"An AI platform with separate services for: embedding generation, vector search, chat completion, and user management - each scaling and deploying independently."