Principles of microservices velocity

Microservices are small services with independent lifecycles that work together. There is an underlying tension in that definition – how independent can you be when you have to be part of a whole? I’ve spent much of the last couple of years trying to understand how to find the right balance, and in this talk/tutorial I’ll be presenting the core seven principles that I think represent what makes microservices tick. After a brief introduction of what microservices are and why they are important, we’ll spend the bulk of the time looking at the principles themselves, wherever possible covering real-world examples and technology: - Modelled around business domain – using techniques from domain-driven design to find service boundaries leads to better team alignment and more stable service boundaries, avoiding expensive cross-service changes. - Culture of automation – all organisations that use microservices at scale have strong cultures of automation. We’ll look at some of their stories and think about which sort of automation is key. - Hide implementation details – how do you hide the detail inside each service to avoid coupling, and ensure each service retains its autonomous nature? - Decentralize all the things! – we have to push power down as far as we can, and this goes for both the system and organisational architecture. We’ll look at everything from autonomous self-contained teams and internal open source, to using choreographed systems to handle long-lived business transactions. - Deploy independently – this is all about being able to deploy safely. So we’ll cover everything from deployment models to consumer-driven contracts and the importance of separating deployment from release. - Isolate failure – just making a system distributed doesn’t make it more stable than a monolithic application. So what do you need to look for? - Highly observable – we need to understand the health of a single service, but also the whole ecosystem. How? In terms of learning outcomes, beginners will get a sense of what microservices are and what makes them different, whereas more experienced practitioners will get insight and practical advice into how to implement them.