Use cases for synchronous communication

Considering everything that we have covered so far regarding service independence and isolation, you are probably wondering why we need to cover this topic. The reality is that each service covers a specific tranche of our application’s procedures and operations. Some operations have multiple steps and parts that need to be completed by different services, and for this reason, it is important to properly scope which service might be needed, when it will be needed, and how to best implement communication between the services.

Interservice communication needs to be efficient. Given that we are talking about a number of small services interacting to complete an activity, we need to ensure that the implementation is also robust, fault-tolerant, and generally effective.

Figure 3.1 gives an overview of synchronous communication between microservices:

Figure 3.1 – One request might require several follow...