Choosing between non-blocking synchronous APIs and event-driven asynchronous services
When developing reactive microservices, it is not always obvious when to use non-blocking synchronous APIs and when to use event-driven asynchronous services. In general, to make a microservice robust and scalable, it is important to make it as autonomous as possible, for example, by minimizing its runtime dependencies. This is also known as loose coupling. Therefore, asynchronous message passing of events is preferable over synchronous APIs. This is because the microservice will only depend on access to the messaging system at runtime, instead of being dependent on synchronous access to a number of other microservices.There are, however, a number of cases where synchronous APIs could be favorable. For example:
- For read operations where an end user is waiting for a response
- Where the client platforms are more suitable for consuming synchronous APIs, for example, mobile apps or SPA web applications
- Where...
