Overview of the IBM Stock Trader application

Created and enhanced over the past 3-4 years, this polyglot example demonstrates how to create containerized microservices, targeting a variety of application runtimes. For the most part, these microservices are deliberately kept simple so that readers don't get bogged down in the deep technical intricacies that would likely exist in a real brokerage application. That said, it is very much intended to be significantly more instructive than the various Hello World-level examples often shown in beginners' documentation for cloud-native programming.

The example consists of about a dozen microservices that interact with about a dozen external dependencies (most of which are optional). There is also a Helm chart and an OpenShift operator (which wraps the Helm chart) used for deployment of the example, which will be covered in Chapter 9, Deployment and Day 2 Operations.

In this section, we will provide a high-level overview of...