Microservices let teams deploy independently, scale the bottleneck, and isolate failures. This course covers the patterns, the tradeoffs (distributed systems are harder), containerized services with Docker, API gateways, async messaging with Kafka, and production deployment.
This is a text-first course that links out to the best supporting material on the internet instead of trying to replace it. The goal is to make this the best course on microservices and distributed architecture you can find — even without producing a single minute of custom video.
This course is built by people who ship production microservices systems for a living. It reflects how things actually work on real projects — not how the documentation describes them.
Every day has working code snippets you can paste into your editor and run right now. The emphasis is on understanding what each line does, not memorizing syntax.
Instead of shooting videos that go stale in six months, Precision AI Academy links to the definitive open-source implementations, official documentation, and the best conference talks on the topic.
Each day is designed to finish in about an hour of focused reading plus hands-on work. You can do the whole course over a week of lunch breaks. No calendar commitment, no live classes, no quizzes.
Each day stands alone. Read them in order for the full picture, or jump straight to the day that answers the question you have today.
Bounded contexts, service decomposition strategies, service contracts, and the real cost of microservices vs a monolith. When to split and when to stay single.
Each service as a container: Dockerfile best practices for small images, Docker Compose for local multi-service development, and shared networking.
API gateway as the single entry point: routing, rate limiting, authentication offloading. Synchronous REST vs gRPC for inter-service calls.
Kafka for event-driven communication: topics, partitions, consumer groups, and the event sourcing pattern that decouples services without direct API calls.
Kubernetes Deployments and Services for each microservice, Helm for packaging the full stack, health checks, graceful shutdown, and the observability stack (Prometheus + Grafana).
Instead of shooting our own videos, Precision AI Academy links to the best deep-dives already on YouTube. Watch them alongside the course. All external, all free, all from builders who ship this stuff.
The patterns, principles, and tradeoffs of microservices vs monolith design.
Containerizing individual services and running them together with Docker Compose.
Event-driven communication between microservices using Kafka topics and consumer groups.
Deploying multiple services to Kubernetes with separate Deployments, Services, and an Ingress.
The best way to understand any technology is to read the production-grade implementations that prove it works. These repositories implement patterns from every day of this course.
The event streaming platform used in Day 4. The consumer group and partition assignment source explains how Kafka scales consumption.
Google’s high-performance RPC framework used in Day 3 inter-service calls. Protocol Buffer definitions generate client and server code automatically.
A cloud-native API gateway and reverse proxy for Day 3. Dynamic service discovery from Docker and Kubernetes labels.
The service mesh for Day 5 observability. Traffic management, mTLS, and distributed tracing across microservices.
You have a monolith and your team is debating microservices. This course covers the real tradeoffs so the decision is made consciously, not as a trend.
You’re new to a team that runs dozens of services. This course explains the patterns, communication methods, and deployment infrastructure you’ll encounter.
You design the Kubernetes platform and API gateway that other teams deploy to. This course covers the services-layer patterns that your platform needs to support.
The 2-day in-person Precision AI Academy bootcamp covers microservices and distributed architecture hands-on. 5 U.S. cities. $1,490. 40 seats max. June–October 2026 (Thu–Fri).
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