Microservices, Where Did It All Go Wrong • Ian Cooper • GOTO 2024

This presentation was recorded at GOTO Copenhagen 2024. #GOTOcon #GOTOcph

Ian Cooper - A Polyglot Coding Architect at Just Eat @ian_hammond_cooper

RESOURCES

ABSTRACT
Since James Lewis and Martin Fowler wrote their paper on the microservice architectural style in 2013, a lot of words have been dedicated to the subject. But many of them propagated misunderstandings of the properties of the architectural style. Mis-associations with the Cloud Native style, and misapprehensions on how to move from monolith to microservices, meant that the architectures that emerged often bear little resemblance to the original idea; most are just distributed monoliths. Unsurprisingly these architectures are painful and costly to own. Ten years later, the resulting failure to realise the benefits promised by microservices, or a misunderstanding of what they were, has led to a backlash against microservices; now the prevalent wisdom calls for a "return to the monolith," and posters on Reddit have begun to speak of "Death by a Thousand Microservices."

This talk looks at the key misunderstandings around microservices: the problems that microservices were intended to solve; "what does micro mean?"; how to achieve independent deployability; how to avoid anti-patterns like a distributed monolith. It will also explain the problems that a monolith can't solve that cause us to choose microservices. [...]

TIMECODES
00:00 Intro
01:39 Agenda
02:10 Fundamentals & definitions
09:43 The problem
19:27 Advice
43:17 Outro

Download slides and read the full abstract here:

RECOMMENDED BOOKS

#Microservices #MicroservicesArchitecture #Nanoservices #Monolith #SoftwareArchitecture #MonolithToMicroservices #MicroservicesTutorial #IanCooper

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[nsubugakasozi]

The truth is that most companies DO NOT need microservices. Microservices were never designed to be the first solution to any problem. The first implementation should be a monolith AND THEN parts of that monolith are ONLY broken off into microservices when the need arises and when the domain is well understood. The problem is that most developers began applying these microservices right from the initial implementation. When there no understanding of the size of the problem or the domain etc. That's what leads to those nano services, orchestrator services, and thousands of small services with crazy problems like circular dependencies or being very hard to observe/monitor and to debug. In a developer's career, the majority of companies they work for shouldn't be needing microservices. Now every e-commerce website begins from microservices...one to order...one to bill...one to ship etc. Wrong approach completely. This advice should be at the top or in the intro of ANY microservices book or article but they introduce such a complex solution with no warning or explanation given

[NorsKa]

You know the talk is going to be a banger when the first content slide is completely incorrect and the presenter gladly states that "everyone agrees with this".

[cybernetic]

All the talks about "gardening" is well and good, but in practical terms it gets very hard to re organise responsibilities across teams and bounded contexts, its an expensive ask. Boundaries and mindsets have hardened over time, inertia has set in etc, if I realise 6 months later that the reorg we did last year still has some more work to do, its going to be a tough sell because people have to change stuff again. True story

[markcampanelli]

“Domain storytelling” has six syllables, whereas “use cases” has only three. I smell a consultant at work!

[NotMarkKnopfler]

Microservices were invented to generate money for cloud vendors.

[wolfgangfrech]

Content-rich and down-to-earth. Thank you.

Most funny takeaway : You must be this big to use microservices!

Most pretentious word (in quote, not by the speaker): non-ergodic

[cybernetic]

I don't know how you are doing event storming Ian that you are ending up with CRUD systems or entities (nouns), everytime I have done it we have come away with domain events, bounded contexts that are noun+verb (e.g. "vendor onboarding/contracting" as opposed to "vendors"). The low level code models are what ever they need to be to ensure constraints are met and state transitions occur.

[Estigy]

Am I the only one confused by the text colors? Why are some things green, others red?

[blah]

Microservices are working well for the startup where i work.

[NickKeighley]

The term is two pizza team. 5-8 people

[Dabayare]

I didn't feel it solved problems and was a job creation scheme.

[relaxingsounds]

Which company has 1000/2000 micro services?

[himanshujovi]

This is the latest buzzword which engineers promote to brush up their resume, management uses to get good promotions/hikes