The “microservices” architectural strategy has quickly become a mainstay of my application development for many years. While I am comfortable working within more unified codebases when necessary (see, or example, my work converting a large Meteor app—or plenty of legacy projects where there wasn’t a choice), I tend to prefer smaller, coordinated endpoints, particularly now that it is relatively frictionless to employ reliable service layers for connecting app elements (cluster-internal http, task queues, etc), and given the wealth of tools for repeatable, descriptive deployments (kubernetes, severless, terraform).

In a majority of cases, I have set up my endpoints running express under nodejs or flask (with a wrapping server) under python, typically hosted under nginx. For authentication, I prefer solutions like JWT tokens with a primary token-generating service tied closely to the main ingress, because having as many stateless endpoints as possible is one of the key advantages of this deployment paradigm.

I have deployed apps using this broad set of patterns for The University of Alabama on projects that see a great deal of traffic and thousands of active authenticated users per semester, as well as for forward-thinking startups where quick iteration and scaling is invaluable.