Microservices & Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) Mastery

Centralized Logging: ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana)

1 Views Updated 5/4/2026

Mastering the ELK Stack

Checking logs via SSH or text files is impossible with 100 containers. You need a Centralized Logging Engine that indexes every line for instant search.

1. The Stack Components

  • Elasticsearch: The search engine where logs are stored. It's incredibly fast at 'Full-Text Search'.
  • Logstash / Fluent Bit: The 'Collector'. It gathers logs from your containers, parses them into JSON, and sends them to Elasticsearch.
  • Kibana: The UI. This is where you write queries like `level: "Error" AND service: "order-service"` to find bugs in seconds.

2. Structured Logging with Serilog

Don't just log text. Log **Structured Data**. - **Bad:** `Log.Information("User " + userId + " logged in");` - **Good:** `Log.Information("User {UserId} logged in", userId);` In Elasticsearch, `UserId` becomes a searchable field. You can then instantly see: 'Show me every error that happened to User 123 across the whole system over the last 7 days.'

4. Interview Mastery

Q: "How do you prevent logging from slowing down your application performance?"

Architect Answer: "**Asynchronous Sinks**. We use Serilog with an Async Sink so that the main thread doesn't wait for the log to be written to the network or disk. We also use **Sampling** for high-volume logs (info/debug) and 'Conditional Logging' to ensure that we only log high-detail data when an error actually occurs."

Microservices & Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) Mastery
1. Foundations of Microservices
The Monolith to Microservices transition: When and why? Domain Driven Design (DDD): Bounded Contexts and Aggregates Database Per Service: Managing data consistency Service Discovery and Health Checks in .NET
2. Communication Patterns
Synchronous Communication: HTTP/gRPC and Service Mesh Asynchronous Communication: Message Brokers (RabbitMQ/Kafka) API Gateways: YARP (Yet Another Reverse Proxy) vs Ocelot Protobuf and Shared Contracts: Managing breaking changes
3. Event-Driven Architecture (EDA)
Introduction to EDA: Producers, Consumers, and Topics The Publisher/Subscriber Pattern in .NET Event Sourcing: Capturing every state change CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation) with MediatR
4. Distributed Transactions & Resiliency
The Saga Pattern: Orchestration vs Choreography The Outbox Pattern: Ensuring reliable message delivery Idempotency: Preventing duplicate message processing Distributed Locking with Redis (Redlock)
5. Observability & Monitoring
Distributed Tracing with OpenTelemetry Centralized Logging: ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) Metrics and Dashboards: Prometheus and Grafana Correlation IDs: Tracking requests across services
6. Security & Identity
Centralized Authentication: IdentityServer4 & Duende Identity OAuth2 and OIDC Flow for Microservices API Key Management and Rate Limiting Mutual TLS (mTLS) for Internal Service-to-Service Security
7. Infrastructure & Deployment
Containerization: Production-grade Dockerfiles Kubernetes for .NET: Pods, Services, and Ingress Helm Charts: Managing complex deployments Blue-Green and Canary Deployments in K8s
8. FAANG Microservices Case Studies
Case Study: Designing a Global Notification Engine (Reliability at Scale) Case Study: Building a High-Performance Logging Pipeline (PB/Day)