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Sreekar Reddy
Sreekar Reddy

Posted on • Originally published at sreekarreddy.com

🏘️ Microservices Explained Like You're 5

A food court instead of one restaurant

Day 13 of 149

πŸ‘‰ Full deep-dive with code examples


One Restaurant vs Food Court

One Restaurant (Monolith):

  • Makes pizza, sushi, tacos, burgers, everything
  • One kitchen handles all
  • If pizza oven breaks β†’ lots of orders get delayed
  • Want to change taco recipe? Affects whole kitchen

Food Court (Microservices):

  • Pizza shop, sushi bar, taco stand, burger joint
  • Each has own kitchen
  • Pizza oven breaks β†’ pizza is delayed, other food might still be fine
  • Change tacos β†’ mostly the taco stand changes

In Software

Monolith:

One Giant App
β”œβ”€β”€ User login
β”œβ”€β”€ Payments
β”œβ”€β”€ Search
β”œβ”€β”€ Notifications
└── All connected inside
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If payments break, maybe login breaks too!

Microservices:

User Service ←→ API ←→ Payment Service
                ↑
          Search Service
                ↑
       Notification Service
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Each runs independently and talks via APIs.


Why Teams Love It

Monolith Microservices
One codebase, one language Each service can use different language
Deploy everything together Deploy just what changed
Scale everything Scale just what's busy
One team owns all Teams own their service

The Trade-off

Microservices add complexity:

  • More things to monitor
  • Network calls between services
  • Need tools like Kubernetes to manage

Good for: Big apps, big teams, high scale
Overkill for: Small projects, solo developers


In One Sentence

Microservices split a big app into small, independent pieces that can be built, deployed, and scaled separately.


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