Understanding reactive microservices

Before we dive into reactive microservices, let's see what the word reactive means. There are certain fundamental attributes that a piece of software must possess in order to be considered reactive. These attributes are responsiveness, resilience, elasticity, and above all, being message-driven. We'll discuss these attributes in detail and look at how they can make microservices stronger candidates for most enterprise requirements.

Responsiveness

It wasn't long ago when one of the key requirements of business sponsors, discussed in requirement gathering sessions, was a guaranteed response time of a few seconds. For example, a T-shirt custom print e-shop where you could upload images and then have it rendered onto the chosen piece of apparel. Move forward a few years and—I can vouch for this myself—we will close the browser window if any web page takes longer than a couple of seconds to load.

Users today expect near instantaneous response. But this is not...