Vert.x is a toolkit for building reactive applications on the JVM. It is event-driven, non-blocking, and distributed. Malmberg, an educational publisher, is building scalable e-learning applications using Vert.x along with Java 8, AngularJS, and MongoDB on Amazon cloud services. Vert.x is well-suited for building microservices as it allows developing each microservice as an independent Verticle that communicates through the event bus.