Microservices

Microservices architecture structures an application as a collection of loosely coupled, independently deployable services. Each service owns its data, runs in its own process, and communicates with other services through APIs (REST, gRPC, or message queues).

Benefits include independent deployment (update one service without redeploying everything), technology diversity (each service can use different languages/frameworks), scalability (scale only the services that need it), and team autonomy (small teams own specific services).

Challenges include distributed system complexity, data consistency across services, network latency, debugging across service boundaries, and operational overhead (monitoring, logging, tracing across many services).

Key patterns include API Gateway (single entry point), service discovery, circuit breaker (handling failures gracefully), saga pattern (managing distributed transactions), and event-driven communication (using message brokers like Kafka or RabbitMQ).