Online Boutique running locally on kind. 11 microservices, 5 languages, one kubectl apply command.

I want to be honest with you: before this deployment, "microservices" was just a word I had read about. I knew the definition. I could explain it in theory. But I had never actually run a microservices application and watched it breathe.

This changed that.

Google's Online Boutique is a demo e-commerce app made up of 11 separate services, written in five different programming languages, all talking to each other over gRPC. I ran all of it on my laptop using kind , and then I did something that is not in any tutorial: I injected a CPU fault into one of the services just to see what would happen.

What is Online Boutique and Why Does It Matter?

Online Boutique is an open-source cloud-native reference application built by Google. It is not a toy. Google uses it internally to demo Kubernetes, gRPC, distributed tracing, and service mesh patterns.

What makes it interesting for learning is the architecture.…