Preface

The evolution of software means that systems are getting bigger and more complex, making some of the traditional techniques for dealing with them ineffective. The microservice architecture has gained traction in recent years as an effective technique for dealing with complex web services and allowing more people to work on the same system without interfering with one another. In a nutshell, it creates small web services where each one solves a specific problem, and they all coordinate together through well-defined APIs.

In this book, we will explain in detail the microservice architecture and how to successfully run it, enabling you to understand the architecture at a technical level as well as understand the implications of the architecture for teams and their workloads. 

For the technical aspects, we will use well-tailored tools, including the following:

• Python, to implement RESTful web services
• Git source control, to track the changes in an implementation, and GitHub, to share those changes
• Docker containers, to standardize the operation of each of the microservices
• Kubernetes, to coordinate the execution of multiple services
• Cloud services, such as Travis CI or AWS, to leverage existing commercial solutions to problems

We will also cover practices and techniques for working effectively in a microservice-oriented environment, the most prominent being the following:

• Continuous integration, to ensure that services are of a high quality and ready to be deployed
• GitOps, for handling changes in infrastructure
• Observability practices, to properly understand what is happening in a live system
• Practices and techniques aimed at improving teamwork, both within a single team and across multiple teams

The book revolves around a single example scenario that involves a traditional monolith that needs to be moved to a microservice architecture. This example is described in Chapter 1, Making the Move – Design, Plan, Execute, and is then continued throughout the rest of the book.