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Creating Microservices in Nest.js

Microservices can seem intimidating at first, but they're just regular applications at the end of the day. They can execute tasks, listen for requests, connect to databases, and everything else a standard API or process would do. We only call them microservices colloquially because of how we use them, not because they are inherently small.

This tutorial will demystify the creation and operation of microservices for Node.js developers by creating a microservice using a popular Node.js framework, NestJS. We won’t go into detail about the design or architecture of NestJS applications specifically, so if you’re unfamiliar with the framework, I’d recommend you check out its docs first or skip to one of our Node.js samples that use Express directly.

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Why Distributed Apps Need Dependency Management

Distributed cloud applications (aka microservices) have introduced an enormous amount of complexity into the design and operation of cloud software. What used to manifest itself as complexity hidden within a single process or runtime now finds itself spread across tens or hundreds of loosely coupled services. While all of these services can use different languages and can scale independently from one another, the distributed nature can often make the app as a whole hard to navigate, hard to deploy, and hard secure.

This new complexity makes it increasingly difficult to manage and contribute to cloud-native applications and beckons questions as to how we can maintain healthy cloud software. How can we take advantage of the benefits of service-oriented design without introducing friction and cost elsewhere?

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Distributed Apps Need Dependency Management

This post was originally published as Why distributed apps need dependency management on the Architect.io blog on September 16, 2020.

Distributed cloud applications (a.k.a. microservices) have introduced an enormous amount of complexity into the design and operation of cloud software. What used to manifest itself as complexity hidden within a single process or runtime now finds itself spread across tens or hundreds of loosely coupled services. While all of these services can use different languages and can scale independently from one another, the distributed nature can often make the app as a whole hard to navigate, hard to deploy, and hard secure.