Typorithm · hard

Inter-Service Communication

service-commsarchitecturecommunicationdiscoveryresilience

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Full lesson · 8 learning steps Open any exercise for focused practice

Step 1 of 8 · intro card

Learn Inter-Service Communication

Microservices

Services communicate synchronously (REST/gRPC) or asynchronously (events via a broker). Service discovery (a registry or DNS) locates instances; resilience patterns — timeouts, retries, circuit breakers — handle partial failure; versioned contracts prevent breaking changes.

Services talk either synchronously — request/response over REST or gRPC, where the caller waits — or asynchronously, by publishing events to a broker that consumers process on their own time. Async decouples services and absorbs load spikes.

Because instances come and go, service discovery resolves a logical name to live addresses through a registry or DNS. The caller asks for 'payments', not a hard-coded IP.

Networks fail partially, so resilience patterns are mandatory: timeouts bound how long you wait, retries handle transient errors, and a circuit breaker stops hammering a downed dependency. Versioned contracts let a service change its API without breaking existing callers.

Sync: REST/gRPC. Async: events via a broker.

Discovery (registry or DNS) finds live instances.

Timeout + retry + circuit breaker contain failure; version contracts.

communication:
  sync: rest-or-grpc
  async: events-via-broker
  discovery: registry-or-dns
  resilience: timeout-retry-breaker
  contract: versioned-api

Read the implementation

Connect each part of the code to the concept before you type.

1. Synchronous

Request/response calls over REST or gRPC block until the callee answers.

sync: rest-or-grpc

2. Asynchronous

Publishing events through a broker decouples producers from consumers in time.

async: events-via-broker

3. Discovery

A registry or DNS resolves a service name to current instance addresses.

discovery: registry-or-dns

4. Resilience

Timeouts, retries, and circuit breakers contain partial failures instead of cascading them.

resilience: timeout-retry-breaker

5. Versioned contract

Versioning the API lets a service evolve without breaking existing callers.

contract: versioned-api

A complete learning loop

Understand

Read the concept map and follow the code breakdown.

Reconstruct

Type the implementation, repair mistakes and work through every recall exercise.

Verify

Use the final check without hints; revisit weak concepts in short practice sessions.