Sam Newman on moving from monolith systems to microservices

In this episode of the O’Reilly Programming Podcast, I talk about microservices 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.

Discussion points:

• For organizations considering migrating from monolith systems to microservices, Neman suggests moving gradually, by starting with one or two services at the beginning, getting them deployed, and assessing the outcome.
• Newman identifies independent deployability as one of the key principles for doing microservices well.  “If you create a system architecture with independent deployability, so many benefits flow from that,” he says.
• He recommends a “consumers first” focus for microservices, with designs based on how software will be implemented by customers.
• How microservices can enable cost-effective scaling
• In discussing modularity, Newman says “If you want to look at a system that gets modules right, look at Erlang, which was built from the ground up to be a language and a runtime for building distributed systems.”

Other links:

• Videos of presentations from the 2017 O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference, held in New York in April
• The work of modular programming pioneer David Parnas
• Microsoft’s Azure Service Fabric