Are you a software practitioner or architect looking for a specific case study in building a contemporary Internet service using a microservices architecture? You will find this short conference presentation by Cristian Gadea et al. relevant. The authors present a specific design, instantly benefiting a mobile or web-based client experience from server-side processing. They describe a reference architecture for a publisher-subscriber mechanism to indicate the availability of new representational state transfer (REST) application programming interfaces (APIs) to clients, as real-time updates. They also describe highlights of a closed source implementation of this architecture. It is relevant to those building microservices-based Internet services solving this design problem.

The central ideas of the architecture are: (a) a microservices management server that “coordinate[s] the execution of the REST requests on behalf of the client[s],” and (b) “an object synchronization mechanism that is capable of keeping multiple web clients up to date based on real-time synchronization of the local browser data model with” the central database. The implementation is contemporary, using tools such as Swagger, PouchDB/Apache CouchDB, RESTful API modeling language (RAML), Node.js, and Docker.

This is not a research paper or a survey comparing different approaches or tools in the context of a popular design problem. This work describes a working implementation and is intended for practitioners.