Microservices Patterns Learning Path

This module covers the essential patterns for building resilient, maintainable, and observable microservice systems. Each pattern solves a specific class of distributed systems problem that appears repeatedly in production.

Module Articles

#	Article	What You Will Learn
01	Saga Pattern	Choreography vs orchestration sagas for distributed transactions across services
02	Transactional Outbox Pattern	Reliably publishing events alongside database writes without dual-write problems
03	Circuit Breaker Pattern	Stopping cascading failures by short-circuiting calls to unhealthy downstream services
04	Retry Pattern	Exponential backoff, jitter, and when retrying is safe vs dangerous
05	Timeout Pattern	Setting request timeouts to prevent thread exhaustion and resource starvation
06	Bulkhead Pattern	Isolating failures using thread pools and connection pool partitioning
07	Strangler Fig Pattern	Incrementally replacing a monolith with microservices without a big-bang rewrite
08	Service Discovery Pattern	Client-side vs server-side discovery, service registries, and health-check integration
09	API Gateway Pattern	Centralized routing, aggregation, auth, and rate limiting at the gateway layer

Learning Flow

flowchart TD
    A["01 Saga Pattern"] --> B["02 Transactional Outbox Pattern"]
    B --> C["03 Circuit Breaker Pattern"]
    C --> D["04 Retry Pattern"]
    D --> E["05 Timeout Pattern"]
    E --> F["06 Bulkhead Pattern"]
    F --> G["07 Strangler Fig Pattern"]
    G --> H["08 Service Discovery Pattern"]
    H --> I["09 API Gateway Pattern"]

What You Will Be Able To Do

After completing this module you will be able to:

• Design distributed transactions using the Saga pattern with orchestration or choreography
• Implement the Outbox pattern to guarantee at-least-once event delivery
• Apply Circuit Breaker, Retry, Timeout, and Bulkhead patterns to build fault-tolerant services
• Plan a legacy monolith migration using the Strangler Fig pattern

Next Module

Continue to Messaging & Streaming to learn how Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS, and SNS are used to decouple systems.

Parent Learning Path

Return to the System Design Learning Path to review the full module order and continue with the complete learning path.