Node.js Microservices Without Express: A Zero-Dependency Approach

A developer has demonstrated that Node.js ships with all the tools needed to build communicating microservices without installing Express or any third-party packages. Using only node:http, the global fetch API, and node:test, two functional services — a user service and an order service — were built and tested. The exercise highlights real distributed systems failure modes, such as unhandled promise rejections crashing a service when a downstream call fails without a try/catch block. A key architectural warning is also raised: splitting code into separate services while sharing the same database schema delivers the costs of distributed systems without the benefits. The author argues developers should understand these fundamentals before defaulting to Express and Docker setups.