You Keep Using That Word • Sam Newman • GOTO 2024

This presentation was recorded at GOTO Amsterdam 2024. #GOTOcon #GOTOams

Sam Newman - Microservices Expert & Author of "Building Microservices" & "Monolith to Microservices" @samnewman4355

RESOURCES

ABSTRACT
What exactly does the word Asynchronous mean?

When it comes to distributed computing, one of the perennial topics comes down to how different services should communicate. Working out the relative merits of specific technical approaches can become a complex affair however, so we often reach for categorisation to simplify our work. Often, the discussion around inter-process communication hinges on what on the face of it seems to be a simple decision: Synchronous or Asynchronous. Just saying “we’re cloud native!” isn’t enough if you actually want to get anywhere, unless your goal is simply to dump loads of money into the hands of tech vendors and consultants.

Unfortunately, it turns out that this is far from a simple assessment of what approach is best. Aside from many nuances around this topic, the main issue is that it seems that people can’t even agree on what asynchronous means! Is it non-blocking clients?
Message-broker based communication? Does only inbox-based message passing apply?

In this talk, we’ll explore the meaning of asynchronous in the context of distributed systems, and show that using the same word in ever-so slightly different contexts causes a huge amount of confusion. [...]

TIMECODES
00:00 Intro
02:36 Synchronous vs asynchronous
07:59 What I found might shock you!
09:20 Reactive manifesto
13:23 Blocking calls
24:13 Broker-based request-response
26:53 Competing definitions
27:24 Context
32:13 Sociotechnical system
37:49 Outro

Read the full abstract here:

RECOMMENDED BOOKS

#Asynchronous #DistributedSystems #CloudNative #SoftwareArchitecture #EDA #EventDrivenArchitecture #ReactiveManifesto #SamNewman

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[TechTalksWeekly]

Excellent talk. I went ahead and featured in the last issue of Tech Talks Weekly newsletter 🎉

[arthurdent]

Clarity of thought ... beautiful, thank you!

[kilik]

At the beginning of the talk, I didn't get why this term is a confusing, until later I realized the core idea of the conflict around this term.
Using async in code doesn't necessary means the code is asynchronous when looking at the whole system. A single component in the system can use asynchronous code in term of programming language feature, but that doesn't make the system asynchronous.
Great talk, thank you Sam Newman.
I am trying to implement a even driven architecture on an iOS app, using event to talk between services (classes) instead of method call, it's more of an experiment and will see where it goes

[nafg]

Sometime = some [amount of] time, not sometimes (vs. always)

[StephenButler-sghm]

It's easy innit. Synchronous communication is transmitted with it's own clock. In asynchronous communication the clock is externally derived and may wander 😀