30 Books Like Enterprise Java Microservices

Kubernetes is the go-to tool for orchestrating a landscape of cooperating microservices, making it a crucial skill to master.

This book guided me through Kubernetes, from the basics, such as pods, services, and deployments, to more advanced topics, like its inner workings and auto-scaling resources. What I particularly appreciate is the balance between theory and practical examples, reinforced by exercises with GitHub-hosted source code, which I also found helpful as a starting point for building real-world applications.

Mastering a tool like Hibernate is essential when dealing with Spring Boot and databases, as it can simplify the development process if used correctly.

I was particularly impressed by how the authors tackled complex concepts like caching, lazy loading, and transaction management, making them accessible and relatable to persons with zero to no experience, and also making sure that someone with experience does not get bored either.

I found that managing entities correctly and knowing how to deal with JPQL automatically results in a cleaner, more scalable, and performant code base. 

To be honest, I did not expect to learn something new from this book, given the fact that I have been working on enterprise-level applications since high school, which mostly follow a microservice architecture. 

Still, I have to admit that in Richardson's discussion on decomposition strategies, inter-service communication, and managing distributed data, I still got some valuable insights into dealing with such an architecture. Particularly, the saga pattern for managing transactions was definitely a game-changer for me.

Docker is the technology that works perfectly along with Kubernetes, and I believe that in such a fast-paced development environment, applications do not need to depend on the machine that they are running on.

What truly stood out for me was the exploration of Docker's features like images, networks, containers, and volumes, and how these elements create a consistent environment for applications to run. This consistency is key in eliminating the "well, it works on my machine" problem, making our lives easier and our work more portable.

A common reason for microservice projects to fail is a lack of understanding of how to build resilient and fault-tolerant microservices.

This book was a game-changer for me, providing essential strategies to address these challenges. It taught me how to avoid anti-patterns like Cascading Failures and embrace patterns like Circuit Breaker and Bulkhead to manage temporary network issues and overload situations. The real-world solutions it offers were immediately applicable to my projects.

Apache Kafka is the industry standard for real-time event streaming, an essential component for large-scale, high-performance microservice ecosystems.

Despite being new to Kafka when I read this book, it quickly brought me up to speed on key concepts that underpin its scalability and real-time capabilities, such as the commit log, topic partitions, and consumer groups. The book also introduces other critical Kafka features like the schema registry, Kafka Connect, and stream processing with Kafka Streams and ksqlDB. The practical examples provided were straightforward to apply and adapt to my own use cases.

No matter how advanced our tools for developing resilient and scalable microservices become, the million-dollar question remains: How do we effectively break up a monolith into microservices?

This book offers excellent guidance on this challenge. I found its starting point grounded in Domain-Driven Design and its concepts like Bounded Contexts and Aggregates particularly valuable. These concepts are key to mapping microservices to a real-world domain model. I also appreciate Sam’s advice, to begin with a few relatively large microservices aligned with Bounded Contexts and only break them into smaller services when there’s a clear business case for doing so.

I've seen organizations struggle with adopting a business-led API strategy. A key part of doing this involves creating an effective operating model around how different business units or departments can own and deliver APIs effectively.

Luis' book addresses this challenge by presenting various operating models for APIs (centralized, federated, and platform-based) and offering guidance on creating a platform-based operating model. He addresses API architecture as well and I like his idea of API-Led architectures.

This is my go-to reference for organizations that wish to adopt APIs at scale and need to organize multiple teams and departments that own APIs. I found myself referencing it frequently on a project and highly recommend it.

The .Net world is changing fast, and this is a terrific book to help you keep up. This tome covers so many topics it is hard to list them all, but while it doesn’t go super-deep into any one topic it does provide enough of an overview to understand what the technology is and how you might put it to work.  Software Architecture with C# 10 and .NET 6 has helped me understand what exists and what is coming and to decide where to put my mental energy

I enjoyed this book because it provides a comprehensive treatment of various aspects of API management, including API strategy, architecture, design, documentation, versioning, security, testing, analytics, and governance.

The book effectively introduces and covers each of these areas. I am particularly impressed with the chapter on API governance and the governance model presented by the author. Incidentally, as part of some research I was doing, I found that the author's definition of API management is one of the most widely referenced in academic literature.