Building Microservices

What's Building Microservices by Sam Newman about?

• Microservices Architecture: The book explores microservices, which are small, autonomous services that collaborate to form a system. It highlights how this architecture can enhance software delivery speed and flexibility.
• Business Domain Focus: Microservices are modeled around business domains, aligning software design with business needs and avoiding issues of monolithic architectures.
• Practical Guidance: Sam Newman provides real-world examples from companies like Netflix and Amazon, offering a comprehensive guide for adopting or understanding microservices.

Why should I read Building Microservices by Sam Newman?

• Comprehensive Resource: It covers design, development, deployment, testing, and maintenance of microservices, making it ideal for those transitioning from monolithic systems.
• Real-World Examples: The book includes insights from organizations that have successfully implemented microservices, providing practical perspectives and lessons learned.
• Continuous Learning: It encourages embracing continuous learning to keep up with the fast-evolving nature of microservices technology and practices.

What are the key takeaways of Building Microservices by Sam Newman?

• Microservices Benefits: The book outlines benefits like improved scalability, resilience, and quick adoption of new technologies due to service autonomy.
• Loose Coupling and High Cohesion: Emphasizes designing services to be loosely coupled and highly cohesive, facilitating easier maintenance and updates.
• Integration Strategies: Discusses synchronous and asynchronous communication strategies, crucial for maintaining service autonomy and effective collaboration.

What is the definition of microservices according to Building Microservices by Sam Newman?

• Small, Autonomous Services: Defined as "small, autonomous services that work together," highlighting their independence and functionality without reliance on others.
• Business Functionality Focus: Each microservice handles a specific business capability, aligning with organizational goals and prioritizing work effectively.
• Decoupled Communication: Services communicate through well-defined APIs, maintaining loose coupling and enabling independent development and deployment.

How does Building Microservices by Sam Newman suggest modeling services?

• Bounded Contexts: Introduces bounded contexts from Domain-Driven Design to define service boundaries, with each context representing a specific responsibility.
• Loose Coupling and High Cohesion: Stresses that related functionality should reside within the same service, while unrelated functionality should be separated.
• Iterative Approach: Recommends refining service boundaries over time to accommodate changes in business requirements and technology.

What are the integration strategies discussed in Building Microservices by Sam Newman?

• Synchronous vs. Asynchronous: Contrasts synchronous communication, where a service waits for a response, with asynchronous communication, where services operate independently.
• Event-Driven Architecture: Advocates for event-driven architectures, where services emit events to signal state changes, promoting loose coupling.
• REST and RPC: Discusses RESTful APIs and Remote Procedure Calls for service communication, emphasizing technology-agnostic APIs for flexibility.

What are the challenges of deploying microservices as outlined in Building Microservices by Sam Newman?

• Increased Complexity: Warns of the complexity due to interdependencies between services, which can lead to deployment challenges without proper management.
• Continuous Integration and Delivery: Emphasizes robust CI/CD practices to manage microservices effectively, ensuring quick and reliable deployments.
• Monitoring and Management: Suggests comprehensive monitoring solutions to track the health and performance of each service independently.

How does Building Microservices by Sam Newman address testing in microservices?

• Types of Tests: Categorizes tests into technology-facing and business-facing, including unit, integration, and end-to-end tests for service reliability.
• Consumer-Driven Contracts: Introduces consumer-driven contracts to validate service interactions, ensuring changes in one service don't break dependent services.
• Automated Testing: Advocates for automated testing to maintain quality and speed in deployment, allowing confident release of changes.

What is the significance of Conway’s Law in Building Microservices by Sam Newman?

• Organizational Structure and Architecture: Discusses Conway’s Law, which states that system designs reflect the communication structures of organizations.
• Team Autonomy: Emphasizes organizing microservices around autonomous teams that own specific services, fostering accountability and ownership.
• Impact on Design: Highlights the importance of aligning team structures with service boundaries for effective collaboration and faster feature delivery.

What are the best quotes from Building Microservices by Sam Newman and what do they mean?

• Freedom to React: "Microservices give us significantly more freedom to react and make different decisions," highlighting agility compared to monolithic architectures.
• Service Autonomy: "The golden rule: can you make a change to a service and deploy it by itself without changing anything else?" emphasizes designing independent services.
• Postel's Law: "Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others," underscores flexibility in service interactions while maintaining strict internal standards.

What are some architectural safety measures discussed in Building Microservices by Sam Newman?

• Circuit Breakers: Prevent cascading failures by stopping further calls to a failing service, allowing it to recover without being overwhelmed.
• Bulkheads: Isolate different parts of a system to prevent a failure in one area from affecting others, enhancing resilience and stability.
• Timeouts: Setting appropriate timeouts for service calls to avoid hanging requests, ensuring services can fail fast and recover effectively.

How does Building Microservices by Sam Newman suggest handling service discovery?

• Dynamic Service Registries: Discusses using tools like Consul and Eureka for managing service discovery, allowing easy registration and discovery of services.
• DNS as a Solution: Mentions DNS for service discovery, though it may not suit highly dynamic environments, suggesting load balancers to mitigate limitations.
• Human-Friendly Interfaces: Emphasizes creating user-friendly interfaces for service discovery, aiding developers in finding and understanding available services.