PHP and Microservices: Building Distributed Systems

Modern web development requires flexibility and scalability. A monolithic application can no longer handle the load, and microservice architecture comes to the rescue. The book "PHP and Microservices: Building Distributed Systems" is a practical guide that will take you through all the stages of transitioning from a monolith to microservices in PHP.

What is this book about?

The book covers the full lifecycle of a microservice application: from design and protocol selection to deployment and monitoring. You will learn:

• How to break a monolithic application into independent services
• Which protocols and data formats to use (REST, gRPC, JSON, Protobuf)
• How to organize asynchronous communication via message brokers (RabbitMQ, Kafka)
• How to build an API Gateway for a single entry point
• How to containerize services using Docker and orchestrate them in Kubernetes
• How to implement Circuit Breaker, Saga, CQRS, and Event Sourcing patterns
• How to test and log distributed systems

Who is this book for?

The book will be useful for:

• PHP developers with at least 1 year of experience who want to master microservice architecture
• Team Leads and architects planning to refactor existing projects
• DevOps engineers working with PHP projects and wanting to automate deployment
• Students and graduates who want to understand modern approaches to building distributed systems

What will you learn after reading?

• Understand when microservices are truly needed and when a monolith is sufficient
• Learn to design service boundaries and their interactions
• Be able to deploy a full-fledged microservice architecture in PHP using Docker
• Master error handling and fault tolerance in a distributed environment
• Get ready-made code templates and configurations for real projects

Each chapter contains practical examples ready to use in your projects. The author, Alexey Voronov, a Senior PHP developer with 10 years of experience, shares real-world cases from commercial development. The book is written in a lively style and does not require deep architectural knowledge — just confident PHP skills and basic OOP knowledge.

Transitioning to microservices is not about a trendy tech stack, but about business value. This book will help you avoid common mistakes and build a system that will grow with your project.