Microservices

Event-driven architectures with Kafka have become a standard way of building modern microservices. At first, everything works smoothly - services communicate via events, state is rebuilt from event streams, and the system scales well. But as your data grows, you face an inevitable challenge: what happens when you need to access historical events that are no longer in Kafka? 1. The Problem: Finite Retention & The Need for Backfills In a perfect world, we would keep every event log in Kafka forever. In the real world, however, storing an ever-growing history on high-performance broker disks is prohibitively expensive. ...

Building backend systems today will likely involve building many small, independent services that communicate and coordinate with one another to form a distributed system. While there are many resources available discussing the pros and cons of microservices, the architecture, and when it is appropriate to use, I want to focus on the functional testing of microservices and how it differs from traditional approaches. In my experience, the “best testing practices” have evolved with the introduction of microservices, and traditional testing pyramids may not be the most effective or even potentially harmful in this context. In my work on various projects and companies, including the development of new digital banks and the migration of older systems to microservices as they scale, I have often encountered disagreements about the most appropriate testing strategies for microservices. ...