Microservices: Rethinking the Way We Treat Data and Services | Confluent

This post introduces the concept of 'data-on-the-outside' as a solution to the 'data dichotomy' in microservices, where services need to hide internal state (encapsulation) but also require access to shared data. It argues that traditional approaches like service interfaces, messaging (without historical reference), and shared databases are inadequate. The post proposes using a distributed log (like Kafka) as a streaming platform, enabling event-driven architectures where services can join and operate on shared streams with embedded stream processing. This allows for greater autonomy and scalability by pushing flow control to the receiver and leveraging the log for both transport and long-term storage.