Communication Between Services
Master how microservices talk to each other — synchronous REST and gRPC, async messaging, event-driven patterns, resilience, and distributed consistency.
This free, self-paced course is designed for intermediate learners in distributed systems. Work through the lessons in order, use the objectives below as a checklist, and practice against real systems rather than memorizing slide labels. Estimated time: ~4.5 hours across 10 lessons.
Prerequisites
- Built or worked on a backend service that exposes HTTP APIs
- Basic understanding of JSON, HTTP status codes, and request/response flows
Course Curriculum
Each lesson is a focused read. Open one, complete any self-checks or exercises, then mark progress in this browser before moving on.
Why Services Communicate
14 min
Synchronous REST APIs
22 min
gRPC & Protocol Buffers
24 min
Message Queues & Pub/Sub
26 min
Event-Driven Architecture
22 min
The API Gateway Pattern
18 min
Service Discovery
20 min
Resilience: Retries, Timeouts & Circuit Breakers
24 min
Sagas & Distributed Consistency
26 min
Choosing the Right Communication Style
16 min
Related articles
Pair this course with deeper guides on the same topic. Articles include diagrams, failure modes, and decision rules.
- Event Sourcing & CQRS in Go
- Reactive Microservices: Akka Actor Model
- Event-Driven Systems: Apache Pulsar
- Distributed Consensus with HashiCorp Raft in Go
See the full Microservices & Distributed Systems topic hub.