New member backend developer exploring cloud architecture and microservices

[GregoryNM]

I'm a new member here, a software developer with about five years of experience mostly in backend systems, and I recently started diving deeper into cloud architecture and distributed systems. I joined this forum hoping to learn from more experienced engineers and contribute where I can, especially around best practices for microservices communication and database scaling challenges. I'm looking forward to some interesting discussions and hopefully being able to help others out as well.

[RichardVM]

Welcome aboard! Sounds like you have a solid plan. My first tip: start with one service talking to one database and a simple message queue for async events, then iterate. Learn the pain points in a small scope before broadening. Also wire in tracing from day one (OpenTelemetry) so you can actually see what’s happening across services. A tiny, pragmatic stack to begin with might be REST for client APIs, an event bus (Kafka or RabbitMQ) for inter-service messages, and Redis for caching. Revisit as you scale, not before you’re forced to.