Backends For Frontends - A Microservice Pattern
Posted on Nov 23 2015
One of the questions that comes up a lot is how do microservices work with user interfaces. Microservice architectures lead to highly decomposed systems, but user interfaces are fundamentally aggregations of functionality. So how do those two things work together? I covered some patterns around how ot handle this in the book, but it's been an area which I wanted to explore more fully. The first outcome of this research is one of my longest pattern writeups so far, Backends For Frontends.
This is a pattern which I've seen used at a number of organisations. It resolves the challenge around aggregating calls for mobile devices, and solves issues with Web UIs and other external users of your services, all while helping to sidestep the problems associated with having one big API backend. I hope to write up some more UI-related microservice patterns over the coming months. In the meantime, if you want to know more, read the pattern writeup - and feel free to leave some feedback!
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