Javier Ramirez

One significant advantage of decentralized data management is the ability to take advantage of polyglot persistence. Different types of data have different storage requirements:

…tored, as long as they continue to adhere to the resource format that the timeline service expects. The maintainers of the friend service could easily rewrite how the friend relationships are stored without breaking the timeline service. On the other hand the use of join queries requires all joins against a table be reviewed and updated if you need to update the table structure.

The timeline service functions as a centralized place to define the logic for what a timeline is. If business requirements change and the client now needs to display the latest two messages from each friend then this can easily be changed in the timeline service without needing to make modifications to the other backing microservices that actually host the basic resources.