Phil WhelanMicroservices Resources
This post was originally published on ActiveState’s blog. View the archived original.
Here is a compilation of a few of the great resources we have found on the topic of Microservices.
Micro services, what even are they?
Jon Eaves attempts to “lead the charge for a definition for micro services” and answer “How is it any different to SOA?”
He suggests, “if software is written according to the simple rules — narrow responsibility and small codebase — then the actual language choice is for the most part irrelevant in terms of defect fixing and extension.”
If you want to understand microservices this is the article to read. Written by James Lewis and Martin Fowler, it describes many aspects of microservices covering culture, technology, and architecture.
Adrian Cockcroft on Microservices and DevOps
In this interview with InfoQ, Adrian Cockcroft discusses how microservices came about at Netflix with some details on how they were implemented and challenges they faced.
He also discusses containing failures using Circuit Breaker and Bulk Head patterns.
Microservices - Not a Free Lunch
Benjamin Wootton, CTO of Contino, gives a good argument as to why a microservices approach should not be taken lightly.
Cloud Foundry and Microservices: A Mutualistic Symbiotic Relationship
As Matt Stine of Pivotal explains, many of issues identified in Benjamin Wootton’s “Not a Free Lunch” post can be solved by PaaS.
Tom Livesey of Droplet gives his own words of warning in this “Lessons Learnt” post. He concludes that “choosing to build a microservice infrastructure is an investment” and they are hoping to reap the benefits of that investment as they move forward.
Richard Clayton outlines the struggles they encountered while trying to adopt Microservices. His advice includes ensuring that your team is up to the task and that you have the resources.
Immutable Infrastructure at Gilt
Michael Bryzek of Gilt explains how they have been experimenting with Docker to improve and simplify end-to-end continuous delivery of their microservices architecture.
Cisco-hosted Microservices Meetup with Adrian Cockroft and others
There is a video and slides from Adrian Cockcroft’s talk at a recent Microservices Meetup in San Jose.
There was also a talk from Sudhir Tonse and Nitesh Kant describing MicroServices at Netflix in which they say that due to the Operational overhead, “a DevOps model is absolutely required.”
Getting Started with Microservices Using Netflix OSS & Docker
Damien Toledo of Nirata also spoke at the San Jose Microservices meetup, for which he has posted this blog post.
In this blog post, Simon Brown states, “If you can’t build a monolith, what makes you think microservices are the answer?“. He reasons that, “the design thinking and decomposition strategy required to create a good microservices architecture are the same as those needed to create a well structured monolith.”
How we build microservices at Karma
Stefan Borsje of Karma starts this post of how they use Microservices for their backend API with “Forget the hype, we’re using microservices in production.” He lists the reasons for moving from a monolith application (scaling, versioning and multiple language support), how they got started, the challenges they faced and where they are at now.
“Microservices aren’t a silver bullet, and they don’t solve everything, but they’re working great for Karma, ” Stefan concludes.
Title image courtesy of Ryan Hyde on Flickr under Creative Commons License.