Microservice architecture promised agility, scalability, and independent deployment. And for many, it has delivered. But it also introduced a silent, creeping complexity that can grind development to a halt: data fragmentation.
Each service, in its isolated domain, needs to understand core business concepts. What is a Customer? What defines a Product? What does an Order look like? Without a central strategy, each service ends up creating its own version of the truth.
The result? A tangled web of data synchronization issues, duplicated boilerplate code, and services that are only loosely coupled in theory but are chaotically intertwined in practice. You spend more time writing data transformation logic and debugging inconsistencies than you do building valuable features.
There is a better way. It's time to stop reinventing the wheel in every service and start building on a shared, consistent entity layer.
Imagine you're building an e-commerce platform with a few services:
Each service has its own database and its own model for what a "customer" is. When you need to add a new field, like a customer's segment, you have to update the schema, model, and logic in every single service that touches customer data. This isn't agile; it's a maintenance nightmare that kills velocity and introduces bugs.
What if your services didn't need to own the data model for every business concept? What if, instead, they could access a single, universal source of truth for any entity through a simple API?
This is the principle behind a shared entity API. It's a dedicated layer in your architecture responsible for one thing: defining, managing, and relating the core "nouns" of your business—your people, places, things, and ideas.
By decoupling the state of an entity from the behavior of a service, you gain massive advantages. Your services become lighter, more focused, and truly independent.
Nouns.do is built from the ground up to be this universal entity management API. We provide the infrastructure for you to model your entire business world as code, accessible through a powerful and consistent API.
Instead of defining a Customer in three different databases with four different ORM models, you define it once in Nouns.do. It looks something like this:
{
"id": "cus_1a2b3c4d5e6f7g8h",
"object": "entity",
"type": "Customer",
"properties": {
"name": "Jane Doe",
"email": "jane.doe@example.com",
"status": "active",
"segment": "enterprise",
"createdAt": "2023-10-27T10:00:00Z"
},
"relationships": {
"orders": "/v1/entities?type=Order&customerId=cus_1a2b3c4d5e6f7g8h",
"account": "/v1/entities/acct_8h7g6f5e4d3c2b1a"
}
}
This single JSON object becomes the canonical representation of a Customer. Now, let's see how our e-commerce services are transformed:
The benefits are immediate and profound.
Your teams no longer need to write CRUD operations, database migrations, or validation logic for the same core entities over and over. They simply interact with the Nouns.do API. This frees them up to focus on the unique business logic that makes their service valuable. Development speed skyrockets when you remove the redundant data management tax from every project.
With a single source of truth, data drift becomes a thing of the past. A Customer is a Customer, everywhere. When you update the model—say, adding a loyalty_tier property—it's instantly available to all services without requiring a single deployment. Relationships are explicit and managed centrally, ensuring your data graph remains coherent and reliable.
You might be thinking, "Isn't this just a shared database?" Not at all. A traditional database stores raw data. Nouns.do operates at a higher level of abstraction. It's a business-aware layer that understands not just the data but its meaning and relationships. It provides a rich, relational API graph out of the box, handling complex joins and relationship traversal for you. You can define one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many relationships between any of your entities, creating a true digital model of your business domain.
Building a robust, scalable microservice architecture requires a solid foundation. By treating your core business entities as a shared, API-driven resource, you can eliminate data silos, reduce complexity, and empower your teams to build faster and smarter.
Stop letting data management slow you down. Start modeling your business world with a universal entity API.
Ready to unify your architecture? Explore Nouns.do and see how a shared entity layer can transform your services from day one.