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LetsGit.IT/Categories/Microservices
Microservicesmedium

If services can’t share a DB, how do they share data?

Tags
#contracts#events#api#read-model
Back to categoryPractice quiz

Answer

Through APIs (request/response) or events (publish/subscribe). A service owns its data and exposes it via stable contracts; other services can build read models or caches from events when they need local reads.

Advanced answer

Deep dive

Expanding on the short answer — what usually matters in practice:

  • Context (tags): contracts, events, api, read-model
  • Scaling: what scales horizontally vs vertically, where bottlenecks appear.
  • Reliability: retries/circuit breakers/idempotency, observability (logs/metrics/traces).
  • Evolution: keep changes cheap (boundaries, contracts, tests).
  • Explain the "why", not just the "what" (intuition + consequences).
  • Trade-offs: what you gain/lose (time, memory, complexity, risk).
  • Edge cases: empty inputs, large inputs, invalid inputs, concurrency.

Examples

A tiny example (an explanation template):

// Example: discuss trade-offs for "if-services-can’t-share-a-db,-how-do-they-share-"
function explain() {
  // Start from the core idea:
  // Through APIs (request/response) or events (publish/subscribe). A service owns its data and
}

Common pitfalls

  • Too generic: no concrete trade-offs or examples.
  • Mixing average-case and worst-case (e.g., complexity).
  • Ignoring constraints: memory, concurrency, network/disk costs.

Interview follow-ups

  • When would you choose an alternative and why?
  • What production issues show up and how do you diagnose them?
  • How would you test edge cases?

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