Messaging and Microservice Patterns

Message brokers compared, reliable messaging, event-driven patterns (outbox, saga, CQRS, event sourcing), service discovery and meshes, operating microservices, and observability with SLOs.

6 lessons1 h 15 minAdvanced

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What you'll learn

0 of 6 lessons complete

Message brokers comparedStart Queues versus logs, and how Kafka, RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ, SQS, Pub/Sub and Pulsar differ, so you can pick one for a job.12 minQuizExercise
Reliable messaging: retries, dead letters, ordering and the outboxThe patterns that turn an at-least-once broker into a correct system: idempotent consumers, retry policies, dead letter queues, ordering and the transactional outbox.13 minQuizExercise
Event-driven architecture: sagas, CQRS and event sourcingHow services coordinate without distributed transactions: events, sagas with compensation, separate read and write models, and storing changes instead of state.14 minQuizExercise
Service discovery, service mesh and sidecarsHow services find each other as instances come and go, and how sidecar proxies and a mesh move retries, security and telemetry out of application code.12 minQuizExercise
Operating microservices: config, secrets, feature flags, tracing and loggingThe operational toolkit around a service: configuration and secrets done safely, feature flags for controlled releases, and traces and logs that follow a request across services.13 minQuizExercise
Observability: metrics, SLIs, SLOs and alertingTurning raw signals into targets people can act on: the three pillars, the four golden signals, SLIs, SLOs, error budgets and alerts that wake you only when it matters.13 minQuizExercise

Who this is for

Engineers building or running services that communicate asynchronously and want the patterns that keep them correct and observable.

After this course you will be able to

Choose between Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS, Pub/Sub and Pulsar for a use case
Build reliable messaging with retries, dead letter queues, idempotency and the outbox pattern
Apply sagas, CQRS and event sourcing, and know their costs
Explain service discovery, sidecars and service meshes
Operate services with config, secrets, feature flags, tracing and logging
Define SLIs, SLOs and error budgets and build useful dashboards and alerts

Topics it coversMicroservices CQRS Event Driven Architecture Idempotency Kafka Observability Time and Ordering All topics

How a lesson works

Interactive diagram
See how each component connects, then run a request through it.
Plain-words toggle
Switch between the technical explanation and a plain-language one.
Practice design
Change a design of your own in the builder and see how it holds up.
Quiz and exercise
Test your understanding before moving on.

Go deeper

These lessons are written from scratch. The books below are excellent next reads.

Designing Data-Intensive Applicationsby Martin Kleppmannmessaging, streams and consistency
Microservices Patternsby Chris Richardsonsagas, outbox, CQRS
Site Reliability Engineeringby Googlefree online; SLOs and error budgets

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What you'll learn

Who this is for and what you will be able to do

Who this is for

After this course you will be able to

How a lesson works

Interactive diagram

Plain-words toggle

Practice design

Quiz and exercise

Go deeper