Hermes communication is a term used in the field of software engineering that refers to the communication mechanism used between microservices. A microservice is an architectural style that structures an application as a collection of small, autonomous services, each focused on a specific business capability.
In a microservice architecture, services are typically distributed across multiple hosts or containers. This distribution introduces the need for communication between these services in order to complete business transactions. Hermes communication provides a way for these distributed services to communicate with each other seamlessly.
Why Do We Need Hermes Communication?
In traditional monolithic applications, all functionality is encapsulated within a single codebase, making it easy for different parts of the application to communicate with each other. However, in microservices architecture, where services are distributed across multiple hosts or containers, communication between these services becomes more complex.
Hermes communication provides a way for these distributed services to communicate with each other without having to worry about the underlying implementation details. It abstracts away the complexity of low-level network protocols and provides a high-level API that developers can use to send and receive messages between services.
How Does Hermes Communication Work?
Hermes communication uses a message broker to facilitate communication between microservices. A message broker acts as an intermediary between different services and facilitates the exchange of messages between them.
When one service wants to send a message to another service, it publishes the message to a specific topic on the message broker. The message broker then delivers this message to all subscribers that have registered interest in this topic. The receiving service can then consume this message and take appropriate action based on its content.
In addition to providing basic messaging functionality, Hermes also supports features like request-reply patterns and publish-subscribe patterns.
Request-Reply Pattern
The request-reply pattern is used when one service needs to request information from another service. In this pattern, the requesting service sends a message to the receiving service, along with a correlation ID that uniquely identifies the request.
The receiving service processes the request and sends back a response message containing the same correlation ID. The requesting service can then match this response message with the original request and take appropriate action based on its content.
Publish-Subscribe Pattern
The publish-subscribe pattern is used when one service needs to notify other services about an event or state change. In this pattern, a service publishes an event to a specific topic on the message broker. All services that have subscribed to this topic receive the event and can take appropriate action based on its content.
Conclusion
Hermes communication is an essential component of microservice architecture that enables seamless communication between distributed services. It abstracts away the complexity of low-level network protocols and provides a high-level API for developers to use.
By leveraging Hermes communication, developers can focus on building business functionality in their microservices without worrying about the underlying implementation details of communication between them.