Introduction

Cloud-native is autonomous. It empowers self-sufficient, full-stack teams to rapidly perform lean experiments and continuously deliver innovation with confidence. The operative word here is confidence. We leverage fully managed cloud services, such as function-as-a-service, cloud-native databases, and event streaming to decrease the risk of running these advanced technologies. However, at this rapid pace of change, we cannot completely eliminate the potential for human error. To remain stable despite the pace of change, cloud-native systems are composed of bounded, isolated, and autonomous services that are separated by bulkheads to minimize the blast radius when any given service experiences a failure. Each service is completely self-sufficient and stands on its own, even when related services are unavailable.

Following reactive principles, these autonomous services leverage event streaming for all inter-service communication. Event streaming turns the database inside out by replicating data across services in the form of materialized views stored in cloud-native databases. This cloud-native data forms a bulkhead between services and effectively turns the cloud into the database to maximize responsiveness, resilience, and elasticity. The Event Sourcing and Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) patterns are fundamental to creating autonomous services. This chapter contains recipes that demonstrate how to use fully managed, serverless cloud services to apply these patterns.