Prerequisites for microservices

To understand better, let's take up an imaginary example of Flix One Inc. With this example as our base, let's discuss all the concepts in detail and see what it looks like to be ready for microservices.

FlixOne is an e-commerce player (selling books) that is spread all over India. They are growing at a very fast pace and diversifying their business at the same time. They have built their existing system on the .NET framework, and it is a traditional three-tier architecture. They have a massive database that is central to this system, and there are peripheral applications in their ecosystem. One such application is for their sales and logistics team, and it happens to be an Android app. These applications connect to their centralized data center and face performance issues. FlixOne has an in-house development team supported by external consultants. Refer to the following figure:

The preceding image depicts a broader sense of our current application, which is a single .NET assembly application. Here we have the user interfaces we use for search, order, products, tracking order, and checkout. Now check out the following diagram:

The preceding image depicts our Shopping cart module only. The application is built with C#, MVC5, and Entity Framework, and it has a single project application. This image is just a pictorial overview of the architecture of our application. This application is web-based and can be accessed from any browser. Initially, any request that uses the HTTP protocol will land on the user interface that is developed using MVC5 and JQuery. For cart activities, the UI interacts with the Shopping cart module, which is nothing but a business logic layer that further talks with the database layer (written in C#); data is persisted within the database (SQL Server 2008R2).