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Service Discovery, API Gateways, and the BFF Pattern

This generated surface maps a learner-facing curriculum unit to its canonical source routes.

Curriculum surface​

  • Open learner-facing unit
  • Curriculum path: content/curriculum/production/semester-08-system-design-leadership/module-02-microservices-service-decomposition/concepts/cluster-04-service-communication/11-service-discovery-api-gateways-bff-pattern-primary.md
  • App: production
  • Semester: semester-08-system-design-leadership
  • Module: module-02-microservices-service-decomposition
  • Unit kind: concept
  • Curation level: module_curated

Learning objectives​

  • Explain Service Discovery, API Gateways, and the BFF Pattern as a boundary and coordination problem, not a default move toward more services.
  • Use Service Discovery, API Gateways, and the BFF Pattern to reason about coupling, ownership, deployment cost, and operational complexity in a real organization.
  • Use fundamentals-of-software-architecture, system-design-primer to connect the learner page to decomposition strategies, data ownership, and service collaboration tradeoffs.

Prerequisites​

  • Comfort with structured system-design thinking and the cost of architectural boundaries from module 01.

Source books​

  • fundamentals-of-software-architecture
  • system-design-primer

Source routes​

Fundamentals Of Software Architecture​

System Design Primer​

  • /books/system-design-primer via Primer: Application Layer, Microservices, and Service Discovery, Primer: CDN, Primer: Domain Name System, Primer: Load Balancer, Primer: Reverse Proxy, Primer: Security

Supporting curriculum routes​

No supporting curriculum routes linked yet.

External enrichment​

  • Martin Fowler: Microservices (read_if_stuck) - Useful for grounding service decomposition in concrete characteristics and tradeoffs instead of hype.
  • microservices.io: Service Decomposition (official_docs_companion) - Provides practical decomposition patterns and failure modes that connect directly to ownership and boundary decisions.

AI companion modes​

  • Explain simply
  • Socratic tutor
  • Challenge my understanding
  • Diagnose my confusion
  • Connect forward / backward

Source-of-truth note​

This teaching unit is learner-facing guidance assembled from multiple canonical book routes. Use the listed source books as the primary conceptual spine for Service Discovery, API Gateways, and the BFF Pattern, and treat outside material as supporting enrichment only.