Why using microservices?
Thinking about microservices usage in 2017.
Thoughts about microservice usage in 2017.
Today, I watched the Sam Neil’s video “Why would you use microservices?”. It’s a very nice summarization of what microservices are and their value to adoption in organizations. Key points that I found particularly interesting are the following:
- Small teams, responsible for its own codebase (restricted to the team domain(s)), perform better and are happier;
- People are talking a lot about the Conway Law in recent times. The idea that the architecture evolves with the organization, however, seems a little bit romantic in my opinion;
organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations — M. Conway
- The good and old scenario of having to change a single line in a monolith and then stop and redeploy the entire application seems more and more absurd;
- The suggested book “The Art of Scalability” seems pretty much interesting, since is a very important topic in the regards of microservices archutectural style;
- The three axis presented (“Horizontal Duplication”, “Data Partitioning” and “Functional Decomposition - Microservices”) are a perfect concept. Those three items are recurrent problems when we continuosly have to deal when handling with modularization of different domains in a physical level.
- In the regards of “Functional Decomposition”, it is nice to figure that DDD patterns (thinking of code in terms of business domain) finally finds its place. Bounded Context are one of the patterns to adopt in order to achieve functional decomposition. Hope people value Eric Evans work now.
- The idea that each part of the application can scale independently gives a lot of flexibility to infrastructure people (DevOps, if you can do it). Add Docker to all this and you have a lot of exciting and interesting material to study and work for several years!
It’s a nice time to work in applications’ infrastructure
- Adopt different technologies easier: this is also great. Thanks to API, there is flexibility to develop microservices using your preferred tools and technologies. For instance, it would be nice to get a bunch of enthusiastic, self-taught people to develop a specific Clojure/Datomic microservice to gather some banking account data without the hassle of hear something like: “this is not the official language of the company; we’re not able to train all developers of the company to code in Clojure!”
- It was nice and surprising that Sam talked in the video about Clojure in the same viewpoint I also consider (“the next best thing”) :D
More information
This video is great. Besides it, there are also a lot of informative content regarding this subject that I have been gathering and studying. I liked a lot the very instructive Udemy course “Microservices with Spring Cloud”, along with the readings: “Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems” (from the same author of this video) (Amazon), “Microservices in Production” from Susan Fowler (Free) and “Migrating and ESB to a Cloud-Native Platform” from Pivotal (Free White paper).
They are all very nice materials to start learning microservices.
