Before we dive into reactive microservices, let's see what the word reactive means. There are certain fundamental attributes that a piece of software must possess in order to be considered reactive. These attributes are responsiveness, resilience, elasticity, and above all, being message-driven. We'll discuss these attributes in detail and see how they can make microservices a stronger candidate for most enterprise requirements.
It wasn't long ago when one of the key requirements of business sponsors, discussed in requirement gathering sessions, was a guaranteed response time of a few seconds. For example, a t-shirt custom print e-shop where you could upload images and then have it rendered on the chosen piece of apparel. Move forward a few years and I can vouch for this myself; I will close the browser window if any web page takes longer than a couple of seconds to load.
Users today expect near instantaneous response. But this is not possible...
