Microservice s Pattern Language
Speaker: Chris Richardson – @crichardson
See list of all blog posts from conference

Modern software development:moving fast and not breaking things!
Do this with DevOps, Continuous Deployment/Delivery and small autonomous teams

Monolith

• Not an anti-pattern because it makes sense at one point
• Can deploy frequently at the beginning
• Then it grows. Quickly
• Then ball of mud
• Get stuck with obsolete tech stack that used when started project

Microservices

• Architectural styles
• set of services
• loosely coupled
• organized around business capabilities
• tackle complexity through modularization
• Improved scalability is secondary (“monoliths can scale quite well”)
• Each service has own private data store/schema (doesn’t need own database)

Benefits

• Once agree on APIs cn develop with less communication and integration
• Easier to understand develop/test
• Less potential for jar hell
• Start up time faster which imporves MTTR (mean time to recover)
• Know who owns each service – with monolith, everyone is responsible so nobody really is
• Can fail safely with new technology because only affects one service

Downside – Complexity

• Now have messaging/remote calls
• Deal with timeouts and partial failures – circuit breaker pattern
• Multiple databases and transaction management – need series of local transactions
• Queries more complicated – can’t just join with SQL. Need to call multiple APIs or replicate data
• Need a lot of automation; a lot of production applications /services
• New feature needs multiple services to be deployed in right order

Your monolith will grow forever and never get better. Automation makes microservices better. But need some automation as pre-req for successful microservices

Pattern language

• To solve architectural problems
• See patterns on microservices.io
• Chris writing a book on the topic – currently available through Manning Early Access Program (MEAP)
• Example of a pattern for dealing with querying data from multiple sources: CQRS – command query responsibility segregation – see CQRS pattern on web
• Chris is still creating new patterns so remember to check back on the site

Overall, I like that more of the presentation was about microservices than the patterns themselves. It shows why this is important and gives the background to read the patterns. I like the patterns he chose to show.