Sam Newman on building microservices

In this episode of the O’Reilly Programming Podcast, we revisit our June 2017 conversation with Sam Newman, presenter of the O’Reilly video course The Principles of Microservices and the online training course From Monolith to Microservices. He is also the author of the book Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems.

Here are some highlights from the conversation:

Getting started with microservices

If you’re interested in adopting a microservice architecture, start with only one or two services at the beginning. Get them deployed into production, and see if it gives you the outcome you’re looking for.

How microservices allow scaling

By breaking apart a monolithic system into individual services, those individual services could be scaled up as required. I could run my pricing engine on multiple separate physical machines, allowing it to handle more load. I could take another part of my system and run it on a smaller machine that doesn’t need as much load.

The importance of independent deployability

If you create a systems architecture where you have that characteristic of independent deployability—where you can make a change to a service and deploy that service by itself into a production environment without having to redeploy anything else—so many other benefits flow from that.

Other links:

• Newman’s presentation Confusion in the land of the serverless at the O’Reilly 2017 Velocity Conference in London