Microservices

The defining property of microservices is independence, not size. A service counts as separate if it can be deployed without touching the others, owns a clear responsibility and holds its own data. Hence the usual split: catalogue, orders, payments, notifications, search. They communicate either synchronously over HTTP or gRPC, or asynchronously through a message broker such as Kafka or RabbitMQ, which is more robust for events and worse for anything that needs an answer right now.

The real gains appear at a certain scale. When several teams work on the product, independent deployment removes the release queue: the payments team ships without waiting for the catalogue team. When load is uneven, a separate search service can be scaled tenfold without running ten copies of the whole application. And when part of the system is critical, isolation limits the blast radius: a failing recommendations service does not take checkout down with it.

The price is complexity, and it gets systematically underestimated. Network calls fail and stall, transactions become distributed, consistency turns into eventual consistency, and debugging requires end-to-end tracing because the error surfaces in one service while the cause sits in a third. You need CI/CD, container orchestration, centralised logs and metrics, and an on-call rota. For a team of three to five people that usually means half the effort goes into infrastructure instead of product, and the right answer at that size is a well-modularised monolith.

Related terms

• MonolithA monolith is an application built and deployed as a single unit: all the code lives in one repository, runs in one process and works against one database, releasing as a whole, which buys simplicity at the cost of coupling.
• APIAn API is a fixed set of rules by which one program requests data or actions from another: method addresses, request and response formats, authentication and rate limits, documented so that both sides can evolve independently.
• CI/CDCI/CD is a pipeline that on every commit builds the project automatically, runs tests and checks, and then ships the passing build to a staging environment or to production, removing manual deployment and the human error that comes with it.
• Technical debtTechnical debt is the accumulated gap between how a system is built and how it should have been built: every shortcut taken to hit a deadline turns into a permanent surcharge on the cost and duration of everything built afterwards.
• SLAAn SLA is a service level agreement: it fixes system availability as a percentage, response and resolution times by incident severity, the hours support operates, and the compensation owed when the provider fails to meet those numbers.

Related services

• Web app and Telegram Mini App developmentFor when a site is no longer enough and you need a product: an account area, a dashboard, an internal tool or a Mini App inside Telegram. We design the architecture, write the backend and frontend, and take it to release.
• IT consulting and product auditThe most expensive mistakes in software happen before the first line of code: a misread problem, a stack chosen out of a contractor’s habit, and a specification that does not exist. Consulting exists to settle all of that before the development meter starts running: what to build, out of what, at what cost and in which order. The result is a document, not an opinion on a call.

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