Microservices & API Gateway
Difficulty: Medium | Topic #24
What to Learn
Service decomposition principles, inter-service communication (REST vs gRPC), service discovery, API gateway responsibilities (routing, auth, rate limiting, circuit breaking), tradeoffs vs monolith.
Resources
- Hello Interview: API Gateway Deep Dive ↗
- ByteByteGo: What Are Microservices Really All About? ↗
- Gaurav Sen: Monolithic vs MicroServices Architecture ↗
Covered by Problems
| Problem | Difficulty | Link |
|---|---|---|
| Messaging App (WhatsApp) | Medium | → |
| Video Streaming (YouTube) | Medium | → |
| Payment System | Hard | → |
| LLM Service (ChatGPT) | Hard | → |
Key Concepts to Master
- Monolith vs microservices: when the split is worth the operational cost
- Service discovery (client-side vs server-side, Consul, Kubernetes)
- Circuit breaker pattern to prevent cascading failures
- API gateway as the single entry point for auth, routing, rate limiting
- gRPC for internal service communication (proto contracts, bidirectional streaming)