What are the key principles of designing microservices?

Short answer: Single Responsibility: Each microservice should focus on one specific business capability.

Explain a bit more

Loose Coupling: Microservices should be independent, with minimal dependencies on other services. Autonomy: Each service should be self-contained with its own data and business logic. Resilience: Microservices should handle failures gracefully, using patterns like retries or circuit breakers. Scalability: Design for horizontal scaling to handle increasing loads. Continuous Delivery: Embrace DevOps practices to ensure independent and frequent deployments.

Real-world example (ShopNest)

ShopNest splits Catalog, Cart, Order, and Payment into services so teams can deploy catalog changes without redeploying payments.

Say this in the interview

1. Define — one clear sentence (the short answer above).
2. Example — relate it to a project like ShopNest or your real work.
3. Trade-off — when you would not use it.