Best of Microservices — December 2025

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    Article
    Avatar of bytebytegoByteByteGo·20w

    How Reddit Migrated Comments Functionality from Python to Go

    Reddit migrated their comments functionality from a legacy Python monolith to a Go microservice, handling their largest dataset and highest write throughput. The migration used "tap compare" for read operations and "sister datastores" for writes, allowing validation with real traffic while maintaining zero risk. Key challenges included cross-language serialization issues, database access pattern differences, and race conditions in verification. The migration succeeded with zero user disruption and delivered an unexpected bonus: p99 latency was cut in half, dropping from occasional 15-second spikes to consistently under 100 milliseconds.

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    Article
    Avatar of nordicapisNordic APIs·17w

    A Software Architect’s Guide to API-First Strategy

    API-first strategy treats APIs as foundational contracts defined before code implementation, enabling parallel development, improved governance, and better security. The approach requires design-first methodology using OpenAPI specifications, RESTful principles, strategic versioning, and robust authentication/authorization. Key infrastructure includes API gateways for traffic management, IAM systems for access control, observability tools for monitoring, and emerging AI gateways for LLM interactions. Security must be integrated throughout the lifecycle with proper authentication (OAuth 2.0, OIDC), fine-grained authorization (RBAC, ABAC), input validation, rate limiting, and TLS encryption. Industries like fintech, retail, and healthcare demonstrate success through improved interoperability, faster innovation, and new revenue streams. The strategy is essential for AI-readiness, as autonomous agents require well-documented, discoverable APIs with clear semantic contracts.

  3. 3
    Article
    Avatar of datadogDatadog·18w

    How microservice architectures have shaped the usage of database technologies

    Microservices have transformed database usage from monolithic, single-database architectures to distributed systems where organizations run multiple database technologies simultaneously. Analysis of 2.5 million services shows over half of organizations now use both SQL and NoSQL databases side by side, with many adopting 3+ different database technologies. This shift enables teams to choose the right tool for each service but introduces new challenges: fragmented schemas require data integration layers like GraphQL, analytics demands OLAP systems like Snowflake, and service communication relies heavily on message queues like Kafka and RabbitMQ for asynchronous decoupling.

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    Article
    Avatar of systemdesigncodexSystem Design Codex·21w

    Top Microservices Patterns

    Four essential microservices patterns are explored: Database Per Service (each service manages its own data with well-defined APIs), Shared Database (multiple services access a common database, useful for migrations but with coordination overhead), API Composition (aggregating data from multiple services through in-memory joins), and CQRS with Event Sourcing (separating read and write operations while storing state as event sequences). Each pattern presents distinct trade-offs between isolation, performance, and implementation complexity.

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    Video
    Avatar of youtubeYouTube·19w

    Is Golang still a growing programming language?

    Go remains a stable, growing language in 2024-2025, ranking 4th in JetBrains' promise index and 3rd in GitHub open-source growth. Primary use cases include cloud infrastructure, API/RPC services, and CLI tools. While it dropped from 7th to 11th in TIOBE rankings, GitHub activity shows consistent upward trends. Go developers earn competitive salaries ($76k-$500k), though job postings often emphasize infrastructure roles over explicit Go positions. The language excels at building AI infrastructure but lacks native ML capabilities. Adoption is steady rather than explosive, with professional developers favoring it more than learners.

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    Article
    Avatar of bytebytegoByteByteGo·20w

    How DoorDash Moved to a Service Mesh to Handle 80M Requests/Second

    DoorDash experienced a platform-wide outage in 2021 caused by cascading failures in their microservices architecture. The payment service's high latency triggered retry storms that overwhelmed dependent services. This incident exposed inconsistent reliability patterns across their 1,000+ microservices. The engineering team responded by implementing a custom service mesh using Envoy as the data plane, rejecting both Istio (too complex) and Linkerd2 (insufficient features). They built a minimal control plane focused on adaptive concurrency, outlier detection, and traffic metrics. Starting with an MVP using file-based configuration and canary deployments, they gradually evolved to include zone-aware routing, header-based routing, and distributed tracing. The system now handles 80M requests/second across 2,000 Kubernetes nodes, with automated onboarding reducing migration time from days to under an hour.

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    Article
    Avatar of nordicapisNordic APIs·18w

    AuthZEN: A New Standard for Fine-Grained Authorization

    AuthZEN is a new OpenID Foundation specification that standardizes fine-grained authorization through a JSON-based decision API. It decouples policy enforcement points from policy decision points, allowing organizations to use any authorization model (RBAC, ABAC, ReBAC, etc.) behind a consistent interface. This approach reduces vendor lock-in, enables dynamic context-aware decisions for zero-trust architectures, and simplifies authorization across microservices, API gateways, and data systems. AuthZEN aims to bring the same level of standardization to authorization that OAuth and OpenID Connect brought to authentication.

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    Article
    Avatar of inside_javaInside Java·18w

    Virtual Threads in the Real World: Fast, Robust Java Microservices with Helidon – Inside.java

    The Helidon team rewrote their Netty-based web server to use virtual threads, resulting in Helidon 4, the first microservices framework built from the ground up for virtual threads. The team shares their experience, lessons learned, implementation tips, and discusses upcoming features in Java 24 and beyond. This represents a significant architectural shift toward leveraging Java's virtual threads for building high-performance microservices.

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    Article
    Avatar of cncfCNCF·20w

    Building microservices the easy way with Dapr

    Dapr is a CNCF graduated project that simplifies microservices development by providing a sidecar runtime that handles distributed system concerns like messaging, pub-sub, service communication, storage, and secrets management. Built with observability in mind, Dapr automatically propagates traces and metrics across asynchronous and synchronous systems without requiring manual instrumentation. Recent additions include workflow orchestration, AI/LLM integration through a Conversation API, and Dapr Agents for durable autonomous workflows. The project was open source from inception, joined CNCF as an incubating project in 2021, and graduated in October 2024 with thousands of contributors from hundreds of organizations.

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    Video
    Avatar of codinggopherThe Coding Gopher·17w

    99% of Developers Don't Get gRPC

    gRPC is a high-performance framework for communication between distributed systems using protocol buffers for binary serialization and HTTP/2 for transport. It supports four communication patterns: unary RPC, server streaming, client streaming, and bidirectional streaming. Compared to REST APIs, gRPC offers better efficiency through smaller message sizes, faster serialization, multiplexing, and type safety with automatic code generation. It's particularly suited for microservices architectures and backend-to-backend communication in distributed systems.

  11. 11
    Article
    Avatar of kogancomKogan.com·20w

    Patterns & Best Practices in Event-Driven Systems — Kogan.com Dev Blog

    Event-driven architecture enables decoupled, scalable systems through five core patterns: event notification (lightweight signals), event-carried state transfer (self-contained payloads), event sourcing (immutable change logs), choreography (decentralized workflows), and orchestration (centralized coordination). Essential practices include implementing idempotency to handle duplicate events, using durable message streams for replay capability, versioning events explicitly, managing schemas through registries, naming events after business domain concepts, and tracking requests with correlation IDs for distributed debugging and observability.

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    Article
    Avatar of nordicapisNordic APIs·20w

    4 API Architectural Styles You Should Know

    REST, webhooks, gRPC, and HATEOAS each serve distinct API design needs. REST offers simple, stateless, cacheable interactions ideal for standard web services and CRUD operations. Webhooks enable real-time, event-driven communication without polling, perfect for automation and reactive applications. gRPC provides high-performance, low-latency communication using HTTP/2 and Protobuf, supporting multiple streaming patterns for microservices. HATEOAS enables dynamic discoverability through hypermedia links, offering flexibility and potential for AI agent integration. The choice depends on specific requirements like real-time events, performance needs, or dynamic navigation capabilities.

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    Article
    Avatar of apacheThe Apache Software Foundation Blog·21w

    The Apache Software Foundation Announces New Top-Level Projects

    Apache Artemis and Apache Wayang have graduated to Top-Level Projects at the Apache Software Foundation. Artemis is a high-performance messaging platform supporting AMQP, MQTT, and STOMP protocols for microservices and cloud-native applications. Wayang is a unifying data processing framework with a cross-platform optimizer that integrates systems like Apache Flink, Apache Spark, and TensorFlow through a three-layer architecture.

  14. 14
    Article
    Avatar of bytebytegoByteByteGo·17w

    EP195: Common Network Protocols Every Engineer Should Know

    Network protocols form the foundation of internet communication, defining how data moves securely between systems. Transport protocols like TCP, UDP, and QUIC handle reliable and fast delivery. Application layer protocols including HTTP, TLS, DNS, SSH, and WebSocket enable web browsing, security, remote access, and real-time communication. Backend protocols like DHCP, NTP, and LDAP manage addressing, synchronization, and directory services. The guide covers 8 popular protocols in detail: FTP, TCP, UDP, HTTP, HTTP/3, HTTPS, SMTP, and WebSocket, explaining their specific roles in data transfer and communication.

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    Article
    Avatar of halodocHalodoc·19w

    Kubernetes OptimizationInPlace Pod Resizing,ZoneAware Routin

    Halodoc reduced Kubernetes infrastructure costs by implementing two optimization strategies: in-place pod resizing to dynamically adjust resources during low-traffic periods without restarts (achieving ~15% CPU and ~10% memory reduction), and zone-aware routing to minimize cross-AZ traffic (reducing data transfer costs by ~25% and latency by ~5%). The approach uses a custom scheduler for periodic resource patching and Kubernetes' trafficDistribution: PreferClose feature combined with topology spread constraints to keep traffic within availability zones.

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    Article
    Avatar of hnHacker News·19w

    Goodbye Microservices

    Twilio Segment migrated from 140+ microservices back to a monolithic architecture after microservices created unsustainable operational overhead. The team consolidated separate repos and queues into a single service with a unified test suite using Traffic Recorder. This transition dramatically improved developer productivity (46% more library improvements), reduced deployment complexity from 140+ services to one, and simplified scaling. While accepting trade-offs like reduced fault isolation and less effective in-memory caching, the monolith proved more suitable for their server-side destinations pipeline.

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    Article
    Avatar of istioIstio·21w

    Announcing Istio 1.28.1

    Istio 1.28.1 is a patch release that addresses multiple bug fixes and security vulnerabilities. Key improvements include support for multiple targetPorts in InferencePool, fixes for ambient mode issues with ServiceEntry resources and multi-network connections, resolution of EDS endpoint configuration problems in waypoints and gateways, and corrections for nftables rules and DNS name table creation. The release also implements security updates detailed in ISTIO-SECURITY-2025-003.

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    Article
    Avatar of microservicesioMicroservices.io·20w

    Authentication and authorization in a microservice architecture - Part 5 - implementing complex authorization using Oso Cloud

    Authorization in microservices becomes complex when decisions require data from multiple services. Authorization-as-a-service platforms like Oso Cloud solve this by centralizing policy logic written in declarative languages (Polar) and evaluating authorization decisions via API calls. Services populate Oso with facts about roles and relationships through events (CQRS pattern), then delegate authorization checks instead of implementing complex conditional logic and database joins. This approach supports RBAC, ReBAC, and ABAC while reducing per-service implementation burden. The article demonstrates Oso integration in a security system application, showing how policies express role inheritance across resource relationships and how unification evaluates permission queries.

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