Free lesson · Microservices Interview
How This Course Is Structured - A Roadmap
How This Course Is Structured - A Roadmap
This lesson walks you through the full course architecture - all 14 modules, how they connect to each other, and how to navigate them based on your timeline and preparation goals.
Interactive animation: Three phases, each building on the last: Foundations in Modules 01-03, The Hard Problems in 04-11, Wisdom in 12-14.
The Three Phases
The course is organised into three phases that move from foundational reasoning to deep engineering to applied wisdom. Each phase builds on the one before it, but they can also be entered independently if you have the prerequisite knowledge.
graph LR
subgraph Phase1["Phase 1: Foundations"]
M01["Module 01\nFoundations"]
M02["Module 02\nDDD & Decomposition"]
M03["Module 03\nMigration"]
end
subgraph Phase2["Phase 2: The Hard Problems"]
M04["Module 04\nCommunication"]
M05["Module 05\nData Management"]
M06["Module 06\nResilience"]
M07["Module 07\nGateways & Discovery"]
M08["Module 08\nObservability"]
M09["Module 09\nSecurity"]
M10["Module 10\nDeployment & Ops"]
M11["Module 11\nTesting"]
end
subgraph Phase3["Phase 3: Wisdom"]
M12["Module 12\nAt Scale"]
M13["Module 13\nCase Studies"]
M14["Module 14\nAnti-Patterns"]
end
Phase1 --> Phase2
Phase2 --> Phase3
This diagram shows the course organised into three phases. Phase 1 covers Foundations, DDD and Decomposition, and Migration in Modules 01 through 03. Phase 2 covers the core engineering problems in Modules 04 through 11, including Communication, Data Management, Resilience, Gateways, Observability, Security, Deployment, and Testing. Phase 3 covers Microservices at Scale, Case Studies, and Anti-Patterns in Modules 12 through 14. Each phase builds on the previous one.
Phase 1 - Foundations and Decomposition (Modules 01–03)
This phase establishes the architectural thinking framework that every subsequent module depends on.
Module 01 - Microservices Foundations. What microservices actually are, how they differ from monoliths and SOA, when to adopt them and when to stay monolithic, Conway's Law and organizational readiness, and the honest cost of microservices that most courses do not discuss. Brandon leads this module from his Amazon and Stripe experience. By the end, you should be able to make and defend the fundamental decision: does this system need microservices?
Module 02 - Domain-Driven Design for Service Decomposition. Bounded contexts, service boundaries, business capability versus subdomain decomposition, service granularity, context mapping, and decomposition anti-patterns. This module teaches you how to draw the lines - and how to justify where you draw them. If an interviewer asks "how would you break this monolith into services," Module 02 is where you learn to answer.
Module 03 - Migrating from Monolith to Microservices. Strangler Fig, Branch by Abstraction, and Parallel Run strategies. Data migration during decomposition. Sequencing decisions - what to extract first and why. Organisational change management. Migration anti-patterns. This module is elevated to a full module because monolith-to-microservices migration is one of the most common system design questions at the senior and principal level. The competitor covers it in two topics. We give it seven, including a full migration planning exercise.
Phase 2 - The Hard Problems (Modules 04–11)
This phase is the engineering core. Each module covers one of the fundamental challenges that microservices architecture creates - and the patterns, strategies, and tradeoffs for addressing them.
Module 04 - Inter-Service Communication. Synchronous versus asynchronous communication, REST, gRPC, GraphQL federation, API versioning and contract evolution, idempotency, message queues, event streaming with Kafka, event-driven architecture patterns, and choreography versus orchestration. Nikhil leads this module. API versioning and idempotency are topics the competitor does not cover at all - and both are critical in interviews and production.
Module 05 - Data Management in Microservices. Database-per-service, polyglot persistence, distributed transactions, the Saga pattern, event sourcing, CQRS, the Outbox pattern with CDC, eventual consistency strategies, and distributed caching. Brandon leads with contributions from Emeka on CDC and data infrastructure. This is the longest module in the course (14 topics) because data management is the hardest problem in microservices and the topic interviewers probe most deeply.
Module 06 - Resilience and Fault Tolerance. Failure modes, timeouts and retries with exponential backoff, circuit breakers, bulkheads, cascading failures, graceful degradation, rate limiting and backpressure, and chaos engineering. Nikhil leads. Resilience is the second-most-probed topic in interviews after data management. Interviewers test whether you can anticipate failure modes without being prompted.
Module 07 - Service Discovery, Gateways, and Routing. Service discovery patterns, API gateway design, Backend for Frontend (BFF), service mesh, and load balancing strategies. Brandon leads. These are the infrastructure patterns that tie a microservices system together.
Module 08 - Observability. The three pillars (logs, metrics, traces), distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry, centralised logging, SLOs and alerting, health checks, and debugging production issues across distributed services. Emeka leads this module from his Netflix operational experience. The competitor lumps observability with security and deployment into one overloaded module. We give it dedicated space because you cannot operate microservices without strong observability, and interviewers at L6+ expect you to know this.
Module 09 - Security in Microservices. The expanded attack surface, service-to-service authentication (mTLS, JWT, OAuth2), authorisation patterns, secrets management, and zero trust networking. Brandon leads. Security in microservices is fundamentally different from monolith security because of the east-west traffic and distributed trust model.
Module 10 - Deployment and Operations. Blue-green, canary, and rolling deployment strategies. Containerisation and Kubernetes in a microservices context. CI/CD for independent deployability. Configuration management and feature flags. Multi-region microservices. Brandon leads with contributions from Nikhil on cross-region coordination.
Module 11 - Testing Microservices. The testing pyramid in a distributed context, contract testing, integration testing with test containers, end-to-end testing strategies, and testing in production. Nikhil leads. The competitor buries testing as a single topic. We give it a full module because testing distributed systems is fundamentally different from testing monoliths, and most candidates do not have a coherent testing strategy when asked about it.
Phase 3 - Wisdom (Modules 12–14)
This phase is what separates a mid-level answer from a senior one. It covers the concerns that only emerge at scale, applies everything from Phase 2 to complete interview-format case studies, and closes with the accumulated anti-patterns and hard-won lessons.
Module 12 - Microservices at Scale. What changes when you go from 10 services to 100 to 1,000. Platform engineering and internal developer platforms. Service ownership and team topologies. API governance at scale. Multi-tenancy. Cost optimisation. Emeka leads. The competitor has no equivalent module - and interviewers at principal level will absolutely ask what changes at scale.
Module 13 - Interview Case Studies. Six complete architecture design exercises - food delivery platform, monolith-to-microservices migration, real-time event processing, multi-region social media, payment infrastructure, and ride-sharing. Each case study is structured as an interview simulation: you get constraints, you design the architecture, then the founders walk through how real companies solved the same problem and what the interviewer would evaluate. Brandon leads with contributions from Emeka and Nikhil.
Module 14 - Microservices Anti-Patterns and Pitfalls. The distributed monolith, premature decomposition, shared database anti-pattern, cargo-cult pattern application, communication anti-patterns, and a closing lesson on the golden lessons senior engineers wish they had known earlier. Brandon leads. The competitor covers anti-patterns in one topic. We close the course with a full module because learning what not to do is often more valuable than learning what to do.
Choosing Your Path
Not everyone has the same preparation timeline. Here are three paths through the course based on how much time you have.
Interactive animation: Three paths by time: the full course in 6-8 weeks, focused preparation in 2-3 weeks, rapid review in 3-5 days.
Path 1 - Full Course (6–8 weeks)
Start at Module 01 and work through sequentially. Complete every exercise. This is the path that produces the deepest understanding and the strongest interview performance. If you have the time, take this path.
Path 2 - Focused Preparation (2–3 weeks)
Modules 01 → 02 → 05 → 06 → 13. Foundations, decomposition, data management, resilience, and case studies. These five modules cover the highest-frequency interview territory. Add Module 03 (Migration) if your target company is known for monolith-to-microservices questions.
Path 3 - Rapid Review (3–5 days)
Module 01 (skim) → Module 05 (focus on Saga, CQRS, and Outbox topics) → Module 06 (focus on circuit breaker and cascading failures) → Module 13 (do two case studies). This is a refresher path for someone who already understands microservices but needs to sharpen their interview framing.
Important: Whichever path you choose, do not skip the exercises. They are designed as interview simulations and they test exactly the kind of architectural reasoning that the lessons teach. Reading the patterns without practising them under simulated interview conditions is like reading about swimming without getting in the water.
The next lesson - the final one in this module - is arguably the most important. It covers how microservices questions actually get asked and evaluated in system design interviews, so you can absorb every subsequent module through the lens of what interviewers are looking for.