Easy Learn
A complete, book-quality guide to the Strangler Fig Pattern for legacy modernisation — coined by Martin Fowler in 2004 and now the de-facto way to migrate a monolith to microservices without a risky big-bang rewrite. Nineteen chapters cover history, motivation, core vocabulary (legacy system, facade, seam, anti-corruption layer), architecture, the…
A complete, beginner-friendly guide to service discovery — how hundreds of moving, restarting, scaling microservices find each other without anyone hand-writing an address book. Traces history from 1990s hardcoded IPs through AWS, the microservices boom, Netflix Eureka, HashiCorp Consul, Kubernetes DNS-based discovery, and the modern service-mesh era. Covers vocabulary, architecture,…
A complete, beginner-friendly guide to compensating transactions — the technique that lets microservices stay consistent when a step fails halfway through, from the 1987 Saga paper to modern orchestrators like AWS Step Functions, Temporal, Camunda, and Azure Durable Functions. Opens with the broken-toy order analogy (money taken, delivery slot booked,…
A complete, beginner-friendly guide to inter-service communication — the set of techniques, protocols, and patterns that let independently deployed microservices work together as one coherent application. Opens with the school-staff analogy (class teacher, librarian, canteen worker, sports coach, principal — none of whom can do everything alone) and the restaurant-kitchen…
A complete, beginner-to-production guide to the API Gateway pattern — the single, well-guarded front door that sits between the outside world and the many small services that make up a modern application. Starts with a plain-English office-building analogy: without a gateway, every visitor (mobile app, browser, partner) would have to…
A complete, beginner-friendly guide to service discovery — the quiet-but-essential mechanism that lets hundreds of moving, constantly-changing microservices find each other reliably. Opens with the “school with 500 students being moved to different classrooms every day” analogy, then traces the history from 1970s-1990s monolithic mainframes where addresses were fixed at…
A complete, beginner-to-production guide to synchronous communication between services — the “phone-call” style of software interaction where the caller sends a request and waits (blocks, logically or literally) for the response before continuing. Opens with the two-friends-on-a-phone-call analogy to anchor the concept, then traces the history from 1970s-1980s mainframes through…
A complete, beginner-to-production tutorial on asynchronous communication between services — the “drop a letter in the mailbox and walk away” alternative to synchronous phone-call-style RPC. Opens with the phone-call vs. mailbox analogy that anchors the entire post, then traces the history from 1960s mainframes through the split into distributed systems,…
A complete, beginner-friendly guide focused specifically on WHY the Strangler Fig Pattern is useful for migrations — the concrete risks it removes, the value it delivers early, and how it beats a big-bang rewrite in almost every real-world migration. Named by Martin Fowler in 2004 after the strangler fig plant…
A complete, beginner-friendly guide to Bounded Context — one of the most important ideas in modern software architecture and microservices design. Opens with the “school departments” analogy (Library, Kitchen, Sports, Hospital Room) to show that the same word (“member”) can mean genuinely different things in different bounded contexts. Traces the…