Building Scalable Microservices: Lessons from Production

# Building Scalable Microservices: Lessons from Production After spending years building and maintaining microservices in production, I've learned that the difference between theoretical knowledge and practical experience is vast. This post shares the hard-won lessons from building systems that handle millions of daily requests. ## Starting Small, Thinking Big The biggest mistake teams make is starting with too many microservices. Begin with a well-structured monolith, identify natural boundaries, and extract services only when you have clear reasons... ## Communication Patterns Choosing between synchronous and asynchronous communication is crucial. We've found that event-driven architectures using Kafka provide the best balance of reliability and performance... ## Observability First You cannot manage what you cannot measure. Implement comprehensive logging, metrics, and tracing from day one... ## Handling Failures Gracefully Circuit breakers, retries with exponential backoff, and bulkhead patterns are essential for resilient services...