Microservices are transforming software development by modularizing complex applications into small, maintainable units. Each service focuses on a specific function, yet together they deliver a unified user experience. Interested in learning more?

In this Best Courses Guide, I’ve selected the 10 best microservices courses, including both free and paid options. And good news: five of these are available at no cost.

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What is Microservices?

Microservices is a software development architecture where an application is made up of multiple independent services. Each service is typically only responsible for one specific action, can be deployed on its own separately from other services, and has its own database. This is in contrast to monolithic architecture, where a single system or code base is responsible for delivering many business solutions.

Thanks to the autonomous and modular nature of microservices, developers can reliably build and deliver large, complex applications that can scale and adapt quickly to changing business requirements while maintaining a high level of performance. It is for this reason that many companies — Amazon, Netflix, Twitter, and Uber — are embracing microservices as a solution to vulnerable, hard-to-maintain monolithic applications.

BCG Stats

• 5 courses are free or free-to-audit, while 4 are paid
• 3 courses are beginner level, 5 are intermediate level, while 1 is advanced level
• Around 4.2K people follow 280+ Microservices Courses on Class Central.

Best Free Introduction to Microservices for Beginners (edureka!)

Microservices Full Course – Learn Microservices in 4 Hours is a free course that covers the theory and basic concepts of microservices with examples. You’ll also be able to name popular technologies used with microservices such as Docker and Spring Boot.

Although the course uses Java in its demos, no knowledge of any specific programming language is required to take this course.

You’ll learn:

• Understanding of microservices, their architecture, and benefits
• The basics of Docker and Spring Boot to get a taste of how microservices are implemented
• Understand the differences between microservices, service-oriented architectures, and APIs
• Explore various microservices design patterns and tools for effective application development
• The top 50 interview questions surrounding microservices.

Best Hands-on Microservices Course with Clean Architecture, DDD, SAGA, Outbox & Kafka (EA Algorithm)

Explore microservices utilizing Spring Boot and Kafka in Microservices: Clean Architecture, DDD, SAGA, Outbox & Kafka. This course focuses on the architectures, patterns, and technologies related to microservices. By the end, you will be able to deploy your application to Kubernetes on Google Cloud using Google Kubernetes Engine.

To take this course, you’ll need to have knowledge of Java, Spring Boot, and back-end development experience.

You’ll learn:

• Introduction to microservices using Spring Boot, developed in Java
• Study Clean and Hexagonal architectures for isolating domain logic from dependencies
• Domain Driven Design (DDD) for strategic patterns in implementing domain logic in microservices
• Kafka, a distributed streaming platform for publishing and subscribing to record streams, featuring persistent disk storage and scalability
• Apply Kafka in implementing Saga, Outbox, and CQRS patterns
• Understand Kubernetes, a container orchestration system, for containerizing and clustering microservices.

Your instructor, Ali Gelenler, is a senior software engineer and architect with 18 years of experience working on backend technologies with distributed environments.

Best Free Intro to Microservices for Java Programmers (RedHat)

Developing Cloud-Native Apps w/ Microservices Architectures is a free course by RedHat. You’ll learn all about cloud-native microservices. You’ll review multiple microservices frameworks and runtimes, as well as learn the techniques to deploy them through a hassle-free DevOps pipeline. By the end, you’ll have experience with containers, Docker, Spring Boot, NodeJS, .NET, OpenShift, Jenkins, Vert.x, Kubernetes, and many more technologies.

To take this course, you’ll need Java programming knowledge.

You’ll learn:

• Introduction to microservices: understanding their purpose and advantages over monolithic applications
• Focus on building and deploying microservices API using Docker Kubernetes
• Characteristics of microservices: elasticity for server discovery and execution, resilience to tolerate failures (e.g., circuit breakers, hystrix)
• Integration of microservices into continuous delivery and deployment pipelines, ensuring security through authentication and authorization of user credentials
• Implementation of logging, monitoring, and tracing for transaction tracking in the system
• Advanced deployment strategies: learning about Blue/Green Deployment and Canary Deployment.

Best Hands-on Microservices Course for JavaScript Programmers (NIIT StackRoute)

Build and Implement Microservices Patterns by NIIT StackRoute aims to teach you how to create an application using multiple microservices. You’ll have hands-on practice building and establishing communication between microservices using Node.js.

The prerequisite for this course is JavaScript. In this course, you will:

• Explore the difference between traditional monolithic applications and microservices applications, including architectural differences
• Develop your own microservice using NodeJS
• Learn synchronous and asynchronous communication between microservices
• Study of the request-response model and RabbitMQ for effective microservice communication.

You can pay for full access including a certificate, or audit the course for free.

Best Language-Agnostic Microservices Course (Pluralsight)

In Microservices Fundamentals, you’ll learn about several key principles and practices about microservices that will enable you to be successful with microservices.

By the end of this course, you will be ready to design and build your own microservices applications, and identify which technologies and practices are a good fit in your context.

No specific knowledge of any programming language needed. You’ll learn:

• Understanding microservices: their purpose, problems they solve, and challenges in building them, focusing on developer productivity
• Architecting microservices: making decisions on service boundaries and data ownership
• Application of principles in an example e-commerce Docker application following microservices architecture
• Exploring reliable communication methods between microservices
• Learning automation of microservices deployment and monitoring them in production.

Mark Heath, your instructor, is a software architect at NICE Systems creating cloud based digital evidence management systems for the police. He is also the creator of NAudio, an open source audio framework for .NET.

Best Free Spring Boot Microservices Course For Java Programmers (Java Brains)

Spring Boot Microservices Level 1: Communication and Discovery introduces you to building microservices with Spring Boot and Spring Cloud. By the end of this free course, you’ll have created an application made up of 4 microservices that can dynamically communicate with each other.

To take this course, you’ll need Java programming experience. You’ll learn:

• Examining the differences between microservices and service-oriented architectures
• Building a movie catalog application from scratch, starting with designing the layout of the microservice application
• Development of various APIs: movie catalog service API, movie info service API, and rating service API
• Learning server port configuration and handling communication among microservices using an external microservice API
• Implementing dynamic discovery of microservices with Eureka (server and client side).

Java Brains offers free Java and JavaScript courses and tutorials on their YouTube Channel.

Best Free .NET Microservices Course for C# Developers (freeCodeCamp)

As the course name suggests, .NET Microservices – Full Course for Beginners teaches you the foundational elements of a microservices architecture with .NET and C#. You’ll use MongoDB, Docker Compose, Postman, and other technologies to build a production-ready microservices-based application.

To take this free course, you’ll need to have C# programming experience. You’ll learn:

• Introduction to microservices and their advantages over monolithic applications
• Creation of the first microservice, a catalog service, using .NET CLI; learning REST API and DTOs
• Adding database storage with MongoDB and packaging with Docker container
• Building an inventory microservice: using Postman for API, NuGet for code reuse, and Docker Compose for MongoDB containment
• Enabling communication between microservices, both synchronously and asynchronously, using optimal development patterns
• Integration of microservices with the front end for coordinated functionality.

Julio Casal is a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft in the Xbox Cloud Gaming department. Before that, he was a software developer at Oracle and served as a software consultant at various companies. The course also has a website here.

Best Advanced Microservices Course with Node for JavaScript Developers (Stephen Grider)

Microservices with Node JS and React by Stephen Grider walks you through every single step of building a production-ready microservice app using a minimal number of outside libraries. Along the way, you’ll build your skills with both front end and back end technologies including MongoDB, Docker, Kubernetes, and TypeScript.

The only JavaScript experience you’ll need for this course is basic knowledge of Node, Express, and React. You’ll learn:

• Understanding fundamental concepts of microservices, including their role in both frontend and backend technology stacks.
• Creating a mini-microservices application, involving running services with Docker and orchestrating them with Kubernetes.
• Learning best patterns and practices for creating scalable microservices across various application domains.
• Modeling and managing databases and testing isolated microservices.
• Building a Server-Side-Rendered React application using Hooks and Next JS.
• Focusing on backend development: learning CRUD operations, implementing a custom event bus, understanding event flow, and handling concurrency issues in client-server interactions.

Stephen Grider has been building complex JavaScript front ends for top corporations in the San Francisco Bay Area. He teaches on Udemy to share the knowledge he has gained with other software engineers.

Best Microservices Course for Go Developers (Trevor Sawler)

Working with Microservices in Go by Trevor Sawler teaches you how to build scalable, resilient distributed applications or microservices in Go, a language perfect for building distributed web applications.

By the end of this paid course, you’ll be able to build large-scale web applications as a collection of smaller efficient applications with Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, and Go.

To take this course, you’ll need a basic understanding of the Go programming language. You’ll learn:

• Developing microservices in Go, communicating through REST API, RPC, gRPC, and AMQP.
• Front-end service with HTML/CSS and JavaScript for web page display.
• Authentication service using a Postgres database.
• Logging service integrated with a MongoDB database.
• Listener service for processing RabbitMQ messages.
• Broker service as an optional gateway to the microservice cluster.
• Mail service for formatting and sending emails from JSON payloads.
• Deployment on Docker Swarm and Kubernetes, emphasizing scalable application and low-downtime updates.

Trevor is an Associate Professor at St. Thomas University. Some of his other courses include:

• Learn Go for Beginners Crash Course (Golang)
• Building Modern Web Applications with Go (Golang).

Why You Should Trust Us

Class Central, a Tripadvisor for online education, has helped 60 million learners find their next course. We’ve been combing through online education for more than a decade to aggregate a catalog of 200,000 online courses and 200,000 reviews written by our users. And we’re online learners ourselves: combined, the Class Central team has completed over 400 online courses, including online degrees.

Best Courses Guides Methodology

I built this ranking following the now tried-and-tested methodology used in previous Best Courses Guides (you can find them all here). It involves a three-step process:

1. Research: I started by leveraging Class Central’s database with 200K online courses and 200K+ reviews. Then, I made a preliminary selection of 280+ Microservices courses by rating, reviews, and bookmarks.
2. Evaluate: I read through reviews on Class Central, Reddit, and course providers to understand what other learners thought about each course and combined it with my own experience as a learner.
3. Select: Well-made courses were picked if they presented valuable and engaging content and they have to fit in a set of criteria and be ranked accordingly: comprehensive curriculum, affordability, release date, ratings and enrollments.

Fabio has revised the research and the latest version of this article.