Engineering the Future of Software
29–31 Oct 2018: Tutorials & Conference
31 Oct–1 Nov 2018: Training
London, UK

Three common pitfalls in microservice integration and how to avoid them

Bernd Ruecker (Camunda)
14:1515:05 Monday, 29 October 2018
Distributed systems
Location: King's Suite - Balmoral
Secondary topics:  Best Practice, Hands-on
Average rating: ****.
(4.29, 14 ratings)

Who is this presentation for?

  • Developers and architects

What you'll learn

  • Understand the challenges of distributed systems, simple strategies and frameworks to help, and concrete source code examples to use as starting point

Description

Integrating microservices and taming distributed systems is hard. Most people still integrate via REST but are not even aware of missing consistency guarantees in these architectures. Bernd Rücker shares three challenges he’s observed in real-life projects and demonstrates how to avoid them, using live coding.

Challenges include:

  • Communication is complex. When everything is distributed, failures are normal, so you need sophisticated failure handling strategies (e.g., stateful retry).
  • Asynchronicity requires you to handle timeouts. This is not only about milliseconds; systems get much more resilient when you can wait for minutes, hours, or even longer.
  • Distributed transactions cannot simply be delegated to protocols like XA. You need to solve the requirement to retain consistency in case of failures.
Photo of Bernd Ruecker

Bernd Ruecker

Camunda

Bernd Rücker is a cofounder and developer advocate at Camunda, an open source software company reinventing workflow automation, where he focuses on new workflow automation paradigms that fit into modern architectures around distributed systems, microservices, domain-driven design, event-driven architecture, and reactive systems. Previously, Bernd helped automate highly scalable core workflows at global companies including T-Mobile, Lufthansa, and Zalando and contributed to various open source workflow engines. He coauthored Real-Life BPMN, a popular book about workflow modeling and automation, writes for various magazines, and regularly speaks at conferences.