In this guide we will discuss Twilio, which is the API that we will connect to for sending SMS messages from our microservice. If you've never heard of it before, Twilio is a great service that has a full set of communication features, such as:

• Sending and receiving SMS messages
• Sending and receiving phone calls
• Configuring/automating a phone system
• And a long list of other services

Our application is going to leverage the SMS sending functionality from Twilio, so in order to get started, navigate to Twilio.com and sign up for a free account.

Once logged in you'll want to navigate to the Console Dashboard and get your Account SID and Auth Token, these are going to be used for authorizing our API requests.

Next navigate to the side of the page (at least that's where the to go at the time of this writing) and go to the Phone Numbers page:

Here you will need to add and verify a phone number. Twilio is pretty careful to ensure that their service isn't used by spammers, so for free accounts you'll need to verify all of the phone numbers that you'll use for testing. Paid accounts let you message all numbers, however even with paid accounts traffic patterns are monitored, so you don't want to try and spam users or you'll find yourself blocked pretty quickly.

With all of that setup we're reading to build the connector and in the next guide we'll walk through how to protect our API credentials.