A distributed system consists of a bunch of services connected over a network. Each of the services has a specific purpose. Some of the services might be exposed for interactions with the clients (actors, in the use case parlance). Some services might just be hosting data and doing transformations for upstream services. The services communicate with each other to enable macro behavior and fulfil the requirements of the system.
The services interact with one another over the network using either of the following:
- Application Programming Interface (API)
- Messaging
Irrespective of the channel, the data is exchanged in a standardized format over the network.
The API paradigm is the most common. As described in Chapter 7, Building APIs, services communicate with each other over the network. They send requests and receive responses from specific endpoints. The most popular...
