Discovering microservices

There is an endless collection of books, papers, and blog posts that excellently describe and analyze microservice-style architecture. The objective of this chapter is to present you with the advantages and challenges of using a microservices architecture and 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 have 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. Microservices...