Designing Resilient Microservices

After years of designing and migrating systems to microservices, I've accumulated a set of hard-won lessons...

Circuit Breakers Are Not Optional

Every service call is a potential failure point. The circuit breaker pattern prevents cascading failures from taking down your entire system.

Design for Failure First

Assume every downstream service will fail. Build retry logic, timeouts, and graceful degradation before you build the happy path.

Conclusion

Microservices are a great tool — but they trade deployment complexity for operational complexity. Go in with open eyes.