Design patterns in microservices
Here are the most important and commonly used design patterns in microservices
π 1. Saga Pattern
Purpose: Handle distributed transactions across multiple microservices
Type: Choreography or Orchestration
Use Case: Order → Payment → Inventory → Shipping with rollback on failure
π 2. Circuit Breaker Pattern
Purpose: Prevent system overload and failures from cascading
How: If one service is down, stop calling it temporarily (open the circuit)
Library: Resilience4j, Hystrix (legacy)
Use Case: Call to Payment Service fails 3 times → short-circuit and fallback
π¨ 3. Retry Pattern
Purpose: Automatically retry failed calls a few times before failing
When to use: Temporary network glitch, slow downstream service
Tool: Resilience4j retry module
π¦ 4. Bulkhead Pattern
Purpose: Isolate failures by partitioning the system (like compartments in a ship)
Use Case: One slow service should not block others
How: Allocate different thread pools/queues to services
π 5. API Gateway Pattern
Purpose: Single entry point for all external requests
Responsibilities: Routing, Auth, Rate limiting, Logging
Tool: Spring Cloud Gateway, Kong, Zuul, AWS API Gateway
π§ 6. Service Discovery Pattern
Purpose: Automatically find and route to services without hardcoding IPs
Tools: Eureka, Consul, Kubernetes DNS
π‘ 7. Strangler Pattern
Purpose: Gradually migrate a monolith to microservices
How: Route certain functionalities to new services while keeping old monolith running
Tool: API Gateway with routing rules
π 8. Sidecar Pattern
Purpose: Deploy helper tools (e.g., logging, proxy, security) alongside app container
Use Case: Istio (Envoy sidecar), Fluentd logging agent
π 9. Aggregator Pattern
Purpose: One service calls multiple microservices, aggregates their responses
Use Case: UI needs data from User, Product, Order services → one gateway combines it
π 10. Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS)
Purpose: Separate write (command) and read (query) models for scalability and speed
Use Case: Event sourcing + read replicas
π§Ύ 11. Event Sourcing Pattern
Purpose: Store changes as a sequence of events, not just current state
Use Case: Banking apps, audit trails
Tool: Axon, EventStore
✅ Summary Table
Pattern | Purpose |
---|---|
Saga | Handle distributed transactions |
Circuit Breaker | Prevent cascading failures |
Retry | Temporary recovery |
Bulkhead | Failure isolation |
API Gateway | Entry point for clients |
Service Discovery | Dynamic service location |
Strangler | Migrate monolith to microservices |
Sidecar | Attach helper components |
Aggregator | Combine responses from services |
CQRS | Separate read/write models |
Event Sourcing | Store history as events |
Let me know if you want code samples, architecture diagrams, or use cases for any of these!
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