Purpose (the why):  

• Follow best practices for inter-app communication in a cloud-native environment.  Specifically, this means that communication between applications should occur across agreed-upon interfaces, codified as APIs, and bound by a contract that ensures that both parties are aware of the guarantees and expectations they have of one another.  Doing so enables teams on either side of the interface to operate their services against that contract, and thus make changes with confidence that their counterparts will behave according to codified expectations.

Responsible: 

• App Team Developers, App Team Engineering Manager

Deliverable/completion criteria: 

• Your application communicates via APIs (REST, Asynchronous Messages, gRPC etc) that have well defined and codified contracts 
• Do not use file systems or databases for inter-app communication
• Database and system hostnames can change at any moment.  If a database reboots or a modification causes a hostname change, your service may lose its connection with the database.  API and Kafka endpoints are guaranteed to remain consistent.

Expected duration/effort: 

• Depends on the application

Due date: 

• First deployment to pre-production environment.

How to get help:

• Contact Lindani Phiri (architecture)