Microservices Design Patterns - Aggregator

Problem Statement

Microservice architecture structures an application as a set of loosely coupled microservices and each service can be developed independently in agile manner to enable continous delivery/deployment. When a large, complex application is to be built using microservice architecture, we often need to get the combined result of multiple microservices and show on the application.

Solution

We can define an Aggragator as a simple web module will act as a load balancer, which means it will call different services as per requirements. Following is a diagram depicting a simple microservice web app with aggregator design. As seen in the following image, the "Aggregator" is responsible for calling different services one by one. If we need to apply any business logic over the results of the service A, B and C, then we can implement the business logic in the aggregator itself.

An aggregator can be again exposed as another service to the outer world, which can be consumed by others whenever required. While developing aggregator pattern web service, we need to keep in mind that each of our services A, B and C should have its own caching layers and it should be full stack in nature.