Building JavaScript Microservices with Node.js

When your JavaScript application grows in size you start facing challenges with maintaining the code, fixing bugs, and implementing new features. Also, adding new developers to the project becomes complicated.

Applications are built from pieces, like packages and modules, but at some point those structures aren’t enough to reduce the size and complexity of the application. The idea behind distributed systems is to break big, monolithic designs into small, independent programs which communicate with each other to exchange data and perform operations.

One of the many variants of distributed systems is the microservices architecture, which structures an application as a collection of loosely coupled services. Services are fine-grained and the communication protocols are lightweight (like the HTTP protocol).

There are few things worth emphasizing about the superiority of microservices, and distributed systems generally, over monolithic architecture:

• Modularity — responsibility for specific operations is assigned to separate pieces of the application
• Uniformity — microservices interfaces (API endpoints) consist of a base URI identifying a data object and standard HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, PATCH and DELETE) used to manipulate the object