Design patterns in microservices

 Here are the most important and commonly used design patterns in microservices


πŸ” 1. Saga Pattern

Purpose: Handle distributed transactions across multiple microservices
Type: Choreography or Orchestration
Use Case: Order → Payment → Inventory → Shipping with rollback on failure


πŸ”„ 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


🚨 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


πŸ“¦ 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


🌐 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


🧭 6. Service Discovery Pattern

Purpose: Automatically find and route to services without hardcoding IPs

Tools: Eureka, Consul, Kubernetes DNS


πŸ“‘ 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


πŸ›  8. Sidecar Pattern

Purpose: Deploy helper tools (e.g., logging, proxy, security) alongside app container

Use Case: Istio (Envoy sidecar), Fluentd logging agent


πŸ“ƒ 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


πŸ”€ 10. Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS)

Purpose: Separate write (command) and read (query) models for scalability and speed

Use Case: Event sourcing + read replicas


🧾 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!

Comments

Popular Posts