Ten Talks On Microservices You Cannot Miss At Any Cost!
The Internet is flooded with articles, talks and panel discussions on Microservices. According to Google Trends, the word, microservices — has a steep, upward curve since mid 2014. Finding the best talks among all the published talks on microservices is a hard job — and I might be off the track in picking the best 10 — apologize me if your most awesome microservices talk is missing here and please feel free to add a link to it as a comment.
Microservices by Martin Fowler
Martin Fowler, the well-respected pattern guru, is a great thought leader in the microservices world. This talk is about nine characteristics of microservices, based on this article published on Martin Fowler’s blog early 2014. This is in fact one of the very first articles I read about microservices — and I am sure most of the architects and developers have gone through it many a time. These nine characteristics are: Componentization via Services, Organized around Business Capabilities, Products not Projects, Smart endpoints and dumb pipes, Decentralized Governance, Decentralized Data Management, Infrastructure Automation, Design for failure and Evolutionary Design.
Also I would like to recommend you watching the talk by Martin Fowler with Erik Dörnenburg on Architecture without architects.
Principals of Microservices by Sam Newman
Sam Newman is the author of the book Building Microservices — which is a great resource for anyone interested in microservices. Recently I read and reviewed his book and it’s quite natural for me to pick this talk by him to the list. This talk is about 8 key principals related to microservices. The last chapter of the book covers 7 of them and in this talk he adds one more (Consumer first). These 8 principals are: Model around business concepts, Adopt the culture of automation, Hide internal implementation details, Decentralize all the things, Independently deployable, Isolate failures,Highly observable and Consumer first.
Also I would like to recommend you watching the talk by Eric Evans on DDD & Microservices: At Last, Some Boundaries!. Eric is the author of book Domain-Driven Design.
The State of the Art in Microservices by Adrian Cockcroft
Adrian Cockcroft, is a pioneer in the Microservices field and a Technology Fellow at Battery Ventures. Before joining Battery, Adrian helped lead Netflix’s migration to a large scale, highly available public-cloud architecture and the open sourcing of the cloud-native NetflixOSS platform. Once, I had the luxury of meeting him in-person at the Microservices Meetup — San Jose. He did a wonderful talk on Microservices: what’s Missing at that meetup. In this talk Adrian presents sort of a template for any microservices architecture. The top layer consists of Tooling, Configuration, Discovery, Routing and Observability. Then the Datastores layer is followed by Operational: Orchestration and Deployment Infrastructure layer and Deployment: Languages and Container layer. He further explains in his talk, how Netflix, Twitter, Gilt and Hailo fit into his template for microservices architecture.
I would also recommend you going through two more awesome talk by Adrian: Fast Delivery. Here he presents his experience at Netflix and the lessons learnt: Speed wins in the market place, Remove friction from product development, High trust — low process — no hands-off between teams, Freedom and responsibility culture, Don’t do your own undifferentiated heavy-lifting, Use simple patterns automated by tooling, Self-service cloud makes impossible things instant. The other one is: The Evolution of Microservices.
Faster, Cheaper and Safer: Secure Microservice Architectures using Docker by Adrian Cockcroft
Another talk by Adrian Cockcroft. This was delivered at the DockerCon June 2015, San Francisco. This talk is at very high-level — highlights the importance of taking into account internal as well external threats in a microservices deployment with Docker. Unfortunately this talk does not go into details, as someone would expect by looking at the title. Here is a great resource if you want to learn more about Docker and Container security.
Also I would like to recommend you watching two other talks on microservices security — even though these two are not included in this list: Securing Micro-services with a Distributed Firewall by Spike Curtis and Securing Microservices by Sam Newman.
There is another interesting talk on microservice security, done by Bryan Payne from Netflix. Bryan leads the Netflix platform security team. In his talk he explains how Netflix uses short-lived certificates to secure microservices. We recently invited him to give a talk on it, at our Silicon Valley IAM User Group meetup — at the WSO2 Mountain View office. You can read the summary of the meetup from here.
Developing Applications with the Microservices Architecture by Chris Richardson
Chris Richardson is the creator of microservices.io. I had the luxury of meeting him once at the Silicon Valley Java User Group. There he talked about Developing event-driven microservices with event sourcing and CQRS. In this talk Chris describes the microservice architecture and how to use it to build complex applications. He explains how techniques such as Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) and Event Sourcing address the key challenges of developing applications with this architecture.
Cloud Native NetflixOSS Services on Docker by Andrew Spyker (IBM) and Sudhir Tonse (Netflix)
Everyone who hear about microservices, would love to hear how Netflix does with microservices. There are many talks done by Netflix architects and developers on microservices. Netflix is hosted on AWS — and doing so they had to develop many tools to improve their developer productivity and automate the microservices deployment. Then they decide to open source everything they developed and that is how NetflixOSS was born. This talk explains how to port the NetflixOSS microservices cloud platform to work within a Docker environment (including Auto Scaling, Asgard, and Eureka services).
Also I would like to recommend you going through two mores talks ( even though these two are not included in this list), Microservices at Proximus: Netflix OSS and HATEOAS by Andreas Evers and Web Operations in the Era of Microservices at Netflix by Diptanu Choudhury.
The Seven Deadly Sins of Microservices by Daniel Bryant
Daniel Bryant is a Principal Consultant for OpenCredo. This is a great talk by Daniel, for anyone who is starting to move into the microservices world, with its hype. Here he highlights seven anti-patterns in building a microservices architecture: Using the latest and greatest tech, Excessive communication protocols, All your services are belong to us, Creating a distributed monolithic, Blowing up when bad things happen, The shared single domain fallacy and Testing in the world of transience.
Don’t Build a Distributed Monolith by Ben Christensen
Ben Christensen is a software engineer at Facebook and prior to that he worked at Netflix working on the Netflix API Platform team responsible for fault tolerance, performance, architecture and scale while enabling millions of customers to access the Netflix experience across more than 1,000 different device types. In this talk Ben explains why someone should not couple the systems with binary dependencies and his experience working with distributed systems and microservices. He further explains if this trend is followed, one would easily fall into the mistake of optimizing for the short term, which ends up in costing down the road and resulting in a distributed monolith, which really starts to remove a lot of the benefits of the microservice architecture.
Microservices: Evolving Architecture Patterns in the Cloud by Adrian Trenaman
Gilt is a billion dollar e-commerce company, implemented a sophisticated microservices architecture on AWS to handle millions of customers visiting their site. In this talk, Adrian Trenaman from Gilt explains their experiences and lessons learned during the evolution from a single monolithic Rails application in a traditional data center to more than 300 Scala/Java microservices deployed in the cloud.
Also I would like to recommend you to go through two mores talks ( even though these two are not included in this list), Nike’s Journey into Microservices by Jason Robey and Microservices @ Spotify by Kevin Goldsmith.
Building Applications with Microservices, Docker and Nginx
As you read on Microservices and Docker, you will realize — Microservices and Docker are like a match made in heaven. This webinar by Nginx, explains how to approach application development with microservices — with Rick Nelson, Lead Solutions Architect at NGINX and Jérôme Petazzoni, Senior Engineer at Docker.
