If you’re a regular visitor to this blog, you might be aware that we have been transitioning to a microservices based architecture over the past four to five years, as we have shared insights into the process and the related challenges on multiple occasions. To recap, adopting a microservices architecture has allowed us to regain team autonomy by breaking up our monolithic backend into dozens of decoupled services, each encapsulating a well defined portion of our product domain. Every service is built and deployed individually, communicating with other services over the network via light-weight data interchange formats such as JSON or Thrift. What we haven’t touched on so far is how a microservice at SoundCloud looks backstage.