Ensuring SCALABILITY Using MICROSERVICES

What are the benefits and challenges of using microservices at Spotify, to ensure scalability of development?

In this clip, Dave is joined by Niklas Gustavsson, Chief Architect and VP of Engineering at Spotify to discuss their use of microservices and their misconceptions and antipatterns.

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[ulrichborchers]

Once I saw an also very interesting talk by some tech guys who were responsible for introducing verticals into their organization which explicitly have a "shared nothing" approach.

They put Ops in every team independently and use cloud services for storage. That company is doing e-commerce, so they have a different background, I know. They explicitly stated that they considered to have a dedicated infrastructure team as an anti pattern, while they also admitted that not having one has some drawbacks. And they have standard UI components across verticals, and said that they have to take a lot of care for them so that this dependency at the UI level does not create problems :-)

They said that they solve the related problem by dedicating a certain amount of time across teams ("horizontally") at the level of tech responsibilities (all Ops across teams), without any authority to make tech decisions outside of the teams which need to be involved.

It is of course not the same pattern, but somewhat related, in that the coupling is attempted to be reduced by distributing the software in such a way as to work more independently by successfully avoiding the distributed monolith.

With their approach of "verticals" they moved the dependencies fully away from the tech teams to the organizational level alone, concluding from the talk. But if I got that also right, it also slowed them down, when the bottlenecks were fully shifted to the organizational level. So we have seen here that a company can of course opt out of that to avoid this "accidental" fragmentation :-D

I guess that the best solution is what works best in the given environment, with a lot more constraints than only technical ones ... but are microservices then maybe really mainly a technical slicing after all? Are the domains, or contexts, mainly defined on a technical level, when applying this pattern? Always wondering about that question. And what is their actual architecture there, how did they "interpret" that pattern, what is the architecture of their services?

It was hugely interesting to watch this, thank you.

[foobar]

I don't know, but it sure didn't help them build a stable mobile app. As both a software developer and a Spotify user, I'm considering anything Spotify does an anti-pattern.

[EdubSi]

YouTube is my favourite podcast platform 😊

[rosshoyt]

Spotify needs to stop investing musicians profits into defense contractors and actually pay musicians fairly. CEO is a real piece of 'work'

[brownhorsesoftware]

Very excellent video! Makes me want to work for Spotify.

[dominikvonlavante]

I invest in Microservices in order to scale in logical complexity. Chop up big problems into manageable smaller problems. Rinse and repeat 😊