Software Engineering Architecture Lab

Synchronous vs Asynchronous Communication

REST, gRPC and events — temporal coupling and its consequences. Lesson 4 of Level 9: Microservices.

Level 9 · Microservices · Lesson 4 of 13

REST, gRPC and events — temporal coupling and its consequences.

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Try it hands-on

  • Microservice Failure Cascade — Kill Payment, Inventory or Notification in a checkout chain and add timeouts, retries, breakers, async events and sagas.
  • Microservices Lab — Failures, retries, circuit breakers, sagas and idempotency.

All lessons in Microservices

  1. Why Microservices Exist — and When Not to Use Them
  2. Finding Service Boundaries & Splitting the Monolith
  3. Database per Service & Data Ownership
  4. Synchronous vs Asynchronous Communication
  5. API Gateways, BFFs & Service Discovery
  6. Timeouts, Retries & Retry Storms
  7. Circuit Breakers & Bulkheads
  8. Idempotency: Making Retries Safe
  9. Distributed Transactions: 2PC, Sagas & the Outbox
  10. Observability: Logs, Metrics, Traces & SLOs
  11. Deployment: Containers, Kubernetes, Canary & Feature Flags
  12. Testing Microservices & Consumer-Driven Contracts
  13. Teams, Ownership & Conway’s Law