Backend Applications

Microservices can let teams make independent runtime, language, or datastore decisions. Microservices are a costly tradeoff rather than an inherently superior architecture. Microservices decompose an application into small independent services. Actions in backend systems can trigger messages sent to end actors. Microservices are a poor fit for small teams or simple applications because they create high operational overhead. Microservices can make systems slower, more expensive, and harder to operate for small teams without platform capacity. Service coordination, deployment, observability, networking, and failure handling can outweigh microservice benefits when the product is not large enough. Microservices work best for large-scale systems operated by multiple teams. Microservices are justified when organizational scale or traffic patterns make distribution cheaper than continued coordination or overprovisioning. Microservices are appropriate when components have extreme scaling variance. At very large engineering scale, microservices can reduce coordination costs from shared deployment and shared libraries. Backend applications are the system context in which actor notifications…