Teams adopt microservices understanding the structure of the architecture but with a poor understanding of how to get all the pieces to communicate–it’s all too easy to accidentally create a distributed Big Ball of Mud. In this talk, Neal describes the foundations of distributed architecture communication and how that applies to microservices. He introduces a new measure, the architecture quantum, to help analyze and identify communication boundaries. Then, the session describes many common microservices communcation patterns:

• orchestration
• choreography
• transactional patterns
• sagas
• data caching
• event patterns
• CQRS
• Event sourcing

For each pattern, Neal weighs the pros and cons, summarizing situations where each pattern is applicable.