What this book covers

Chapter 1, Understanding Microservices, introduces the concepts behind microservices, the differences between monolithic applications and microservices, common benefits and pitfalls, as well as testing and scaling.

Chapter 2, Discovering Quart, covers the Quart web framework and the ways in which it can respond to requests, create templated documents, act as middleware, handle errors, and read configuration.

Chapter 3, Coding, Testing, and Documentation: the Virtuous Cycle, teaches you about the different types of testing that are possible, what benefits each type has, and how to set up automatic testing, as well as generating documentation in CI pipelines.

Chapter 4, Designing Jeeves, looks at Jeeves, which is the sample application we use in this book to explain the various concepts behind microservices. We introduce what we need Jeeves to do and describe a monolithic approach to application design, covering the web API interface, database use, and worker pools.

Chapter 5, Splitting the Monolith, builds on the monolithic Jeeves described in previous chapter. This chapter offers guidance on how to identify components that may be good microservices, measuring the effects of changes on the software architecture, and how to cleanly migrate features to new microservices.

Chapter 6, Interacting with Other Services, explains how to make web requests to other services, how to configure and decide where to send those queries, and how to cache results, as well as make the data transfer more efficient.

Chapter 7, Securing Your Services, looks at how authentication, tokens, encryption, and security vulnerabilities are all essential topics to consider for any service, and here we build an authentication microservice for Jeeves, as well as discuss various things to consider when making an application secure against attack.

Chapter 8, Making a Dashboard, discusses how many applications will have a human view. In this chapter we add a dashboard to Jeeves so that it can be controlled using a ReactJS application, as well as discussing where best to add the front-end into the microservice architecture.

Chapter 9, Packaging and Running Python, shows how, once created, an application needs to be packaged so that it can be deployed and run. In this chapter, we will learn about creating and publishing Python packages, as well as managing dependencies.

Chapter 10, Deploying on AWS, looks at how cloud services provide a flexible platform to run a web service. This chapter covers creating containers for our application and deploying it in Amazon Web Services.

Chapter 11, What's Next?, summarizes the main things we have learned so far, and the topics that would make good further reading, as well as technologies that will prove useful for different types of application.