Intuition Engineering at Allegro with Phobos
At Allegro, feature velocity is a top priority. We believe that one of our critical competitive advantages is the rate at which we introduce new features. In order to achieve a high feature velocity, one of the architectural choices that Allegro made a while back was to move to microservice architecture. So when somebody uses Allegro, a request comes in (and we just have a hypothetical example here) to service D — and we can imagine a service D being a proxy or an API layer — and whatever that service is, it is not going to have all the information it needs to serve a response. So the service D is going to reach out to service C and service F, and F in turn will reach out to A, and it will in turn reach out to B and E, and you see that this very quickly gets complicated. Allegro has somewhere around 500 microservices, so you can imagine how complicated the communication map looks.
