In this chapter, you will learn what microservices are, how they are different from other architectural styles, and how existing microservice frameworks support message-driven architecture. We will also help you to decide on the size of a microservice and discuss whether the service size plays any role in identifying it as a microservice or not. By the end of the chapter, you will understand how to build microservices and use them as the foundational component for creating a reactive system. We will support the discussion with a detailed code demonstration of a small reactive system built using the Vert.x toolkit.
The following topics will be covered in this chapter:
- What is a microservice?
- The size of a microservice
- How microservices talk to each other
- An example of a reactive system of microservices