Discovering microservices

There is an endless collection of books, papers, and blog posts that excellently describe and analyze the microservice-style architecture. The objective of this chapter is to present you with the advantages and challenges of using a microservices architecture, to find out how Dapr can help us create new applications based on it.

The nemesis of a microservices architecture is the monolith: no one would ever admit they built or are still working on one. But most of us, in the development industry, spent many years working on monolith applications. In a monolith, as the name implies, all the business capabilities or features are condensed in a single application, probably layered between the UI, server, and database, but nevertheless not designed in a modular or distributed fashion.

In a microservice architecture, the services that are designed to support business capabilities are most likely to communicate with open protocols such as HTTP and gRPC, are...