One of the real pleasures of my job is working with customers to understand their use cases, design decisions and architecture. Recently I’ve been having a lot of conversations about how to maximize microservices so that they communicate with each other – it’s a fascinating process that usually starts with REST and goes down some interesting roads when real-world requirements and constraints come into play.

For example, one of my customers was leveraging a microservices architecture to implement persistent request-response style interactions from their customer-facing user interface (UI) into their CRM/ERP system and database layer. It sounds simple: a typical enterprise integration pattern for intra-process communications, but, of course, these things never are.

In this case their UI used REST, the CRM/ERP system relied on a PHP module to interface with the outside world using a Webhook-style integration, and between them sat a validation and enrichment module that had been written in Node.js.… Read the rest