Microservices and newer technologies for dummies? Going out of the loop

I am a passionate Node developer and I'd like to learn more about microservices and newer technologies which usually are used in stacks including Node.My main concern is going out of the loop; just to make a simple example which doesn't fit in the microservices theme, yeah, I can understand newer things like NoSQL databases, but I can't grasp things like Elasticsearch, Cassandra and other things I consider "weird", like GraphQL, Docker, Kubernetes and all of that.I'm trying to go out of my actual common standards (FTP dedicated servers monoliths using Express + MariaDB + Redis, or Koa + MongoDB + Redis, or mix'em), because I'd like to learn new things, but you know, everything seems a big mess to a developer coming from such a strict background.I can't understand in any way how would microservices be implemented in Node, even though I tried to look to express-gateway and moleculer (I like the first more because I'd like to convert a monolith server which uses Express to a distributed one).For example, I understood that microservices communicate to each other using REST - but wouldn't that be slower? Also, how should developers keep links of microservices' APIs; when changing one microservice's machine or domain, should also all other microservices change with the new API path? What the heck gateways are? And why do we need them?There are lots of questions I'd like answers to, and I think those aren't Node related questions, so I'll just avoid asking in this subreddit - that's not my point.My point is, everything seems so complicated, and there's no article, book, guide which clarifies things for noobies like me, and starters in this distributed-cloud-and-everything world.How can I learn something more?Are there any good articles for beginners which point out how microservices in Node could work?Or maybe any way to keep interest in things which are explained soooo bad online to me? (yeah, I'm more a practical learner, maybe it's because of that).

Submitted June 25, 2020 at 03:00AM by DanielVip3