.NET Architecture & System Design Interview Question #114

What is asynchronous communication between services?

Microservices, API Gateway, Service Communication & Event-Driven Architecture Mid-Level Intermediate

Quick Interview Answer

Asynchronous communication lets a producer publish a message or event without waiting for the consumer to complete its work. The consumer processes the message independently.

Detailed Explanation

Asynchronous communication lets a producer publish a message or event without waiting for the consumer to complete its work. The consumer processes the message independently.

This reduces temporal coupling and can improve resilience and scalability, but introduces eventual consistency, duplicate handling, message ordering, monitoring, and more complex debugging.

Code Example

Service A -> Broker -> Service B
                  |
                  -> Service C

A does not wait for processing to finish.