Sources

Authoritative Sources

The definitions, patterns, and practices in this pack are grounded in the following primary and widely recognised sources on microservices, distributed systems, and cloud-native engineering. Where a pattern has a canonical reference (for example the saga, the transactional outbox, or the circuit breaker), the maintained or original reference is cited.

Pattern Catalogues and Canonical References

  • Microservice Architecture pattern language (Chris Richardson). https://microservices.io/patterns/
  • Saga pattern. https://microservices.io/patterns/data/saga.html
  • Transactional Outbox pattern. https://microservices.io/patterns/data/transactional-outbox.html
  • Database per Service pattern. https://microservices.io/patterns/data/database-per-service.html
  • API Gateway pattern. https://microservices.io/patterns/apigateway.html
  • Martin Fowler - Microservices resource guide. https://martinfowler.com/microservices/
  • Martin Fowler - Microservices (Fowler & Lewis). https://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html
  • Martin Fowler - MonolithFirst. https://martinfowler.com/bliki/MonolithFirst.html
  • Martin Fowler - Strangler Fig Application. https://martinfowler.com/bliki/StranglerFigApplication.html
  • Martin Fowler - Circuit Breaker. https://martinfowler.com/bliki/CircuitBreaker.html
  • Martin Fowler - Bounded Context. https://martinfowler.com/bliki/BoundedContext.html
  • Martin Fowler - CQRS. https://martinfowler.com/bliki/CQRS.html
  • Pattern: Backends For Frontends (Sam Newman). https://samnewman.io/patterns/architectural/bff/

Vendor and Platform Guidance

  • Microsoft - Microservices architecture design. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/microservices/design/
  • Microsoft - Cloud Design Patterns. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/patterns/
  • Microsoft - Ambassador, Bulkhead, and Retry patterns. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/patterns/bulkhead
  • AWS - Microservices on AWS (whitepaper). https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/microservices-on-aws/microservices-on-aws.html
  • Spring Cloud Reference Documentation. https://docs.spring.io/spring-cloud/docs/current/reference/html/

Standards, Specifications, and Frameworks

  • The Twelve-Factor App methodology. https://12factor.net/
  • HTTP Semantics - RFC 9110 (methods, idempotency, status codes), IETF. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9110.html
  • JSON Web Token (JWT) - RFC 7519, IETF. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7519.html
  • gRPC documentation. https://grpc.io/docs/
  • Protocol Buffers documentation. https://protobuf.dev/
  • OpenTelemetry documentation. https://opentelemetry.io/docs/
  • Resilience4j documentation (Circuit Breaker, Retry, Bulkhead, TimeLimiter). https://resilience4j.readme.io/docs

Platforms and Cloud-Native Infrastructure

  • Kubernetes documentation. https://kubernetes.io/docs/home/
  • Kubernetes - Configure Liveness, Readiness and Startup Probes. https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/configure-pod-container/configure-liveness-readiness-startup-probes/
  • Istio documentation (service mesh). https://istio.io/latest/docs/
  • Apache Kafka documentation. https://kafka.apache.org/documentation/
  • RabbitMQ documentation. https://www.rabbitmq.com/docs

Reliability and Operations

  • Google - Site Reliability Engineering book (SLIs, SLOs, error budgets). https://sre.google/sre-book/table-of-contents/
  • Pact - consumer-driven contract testing. https://docs.pact.io/