Everything open source
May 16–17, 2016: Training & Tutorials
May 18–19, 2016: Conference
Austin, TX

Microservices war stories

Blithe Rocher (Fastly)
4:20pm–5:00pm Wednesday, 05/18/2016
In Real Life
 Location: Ballroom F Level: Intermediate
Average rating: ***..
(3.74, 23 ratings)

Prerequisite knowledge

Attendees should have some familiarity and interest in web application development. While there will be some introductory material, the talk will primarily focus on the technical details of building a service-oriented architecture.

Description

The popularity of implementing microservices in today’s application landscape continues to rise, and there have been countless success stories focused on migrating from monoliths to microservices. But as more teams move toward microservices architectures, an increasing number of stories have arisen about the pain of poor choices. Microservices are not the answer to all application problems. Attempts to move away from one giant application to smaller focused services often result in a tightly coupled nest of applications.

Blithe Rocher covers some of the pitfalls and lessons learned from building several service-oriented systems. Blithe explores some of the problems with building, testing, and deploying a functional microservice architecture, from data loss to dependency nightmares, drawing on war stories she has collected and from her own personal experience. You’ll come away with some valuable lessons about microservices without having to go through the pain of experiencing them yourself.

Key questions include:

  • How do you make sure a collection of isolated services all work together in harmony?
  • When you make a change in one service, how do you ensure that you don’t have to update multiple other services?
  • How do you set up a development environment if your application depends on many other services?
  • What happens when you have to update a commonly used library?
Photo of Blithe Rocher

Blithe Rocher

Fastly

Blithe Rocher is a software engineer based in Oakland, CA. Blithe works for Fastly as part of the core engineering team to build the customer-facing Configuration API. Prior to becoming a developer, she received a PhD in physical chemistry from the University of Southern California. Blithe is passionate about teaching other women how to become developers. She helped organize Rails Girls ATL, a monthly meetup for women interested in learning about programming. When she’s not crafting web applications, she spends time traveling, riding her bike, or with her dog, Nola.