Schedule: Overview sessions

Though you can design microservices to talk to each other synchronously, as if they were making function calls, that's not the best way to do things. Choreographed (asynchronous) systems solve many problems inherent in synchronous (orchestrated) communication. Allen Holub shows you how to build effective choreographed microservice systems. Read more.

Jim Gough shares his experience moving from a traditional monolithic architecture to a single API composed of many microservices, along with some of the challenges it presented. Jim also explores technologies and patterns with a mixture of hands-on examples and discussion topics and considers the impact to team culture and Agile practices required to achieve operational excellence. Read more.

The future of software is being driven by intelligent applications. By the year 2020, more than 85% of customer interactions will be carried out without humans. The road to enterprise intelligence starts with the humans behind the curtain. Kishau Rogers explains how to reduce the friction of AI adoption in the enterprise using systems thinking and people-centered workflows. Read more.

While there are differences between serverless architecture and microservices architecture, both require an application to be composed of a collection of loosely coupled components. Thus, it is possible to implement microservices architecture as a serverless application. Nikhil Barthwal elaborates, covering the pros and cons, details of various deployment patterns, and best practices. Read more.

Chaos engineering is a discipline that focuses on improving system resilience through controlled experiments that expose the inherent chaos and failure modes in your system. While most of the publicized literature and tools focus on killing EC2 servers, Yan Cui explains how to apply the same principles of chaos to a serverless architecture built around AWS Lambda functions. Read more.

There are numerous standards and best practices to describe and document APIs, but there's still uncertainty how to best use them to combine API description, documentation, and labeling. Erik Wilde offers an overview of the existing approaches, demonstrates how to use them, and proposes an additional layer on top of which API labeling becomes more unified, and thus more useful. Read more.

Software architects and enterprise architects work with a variety of roles, and often the deep technical work is performed by other application architects or solutions architects. Maggie Carroll shares useful skills and actionable techniques for creating a new architecture function and leading other architects in developing a system of systems. Read more.

Microservices are all the rage these days. But what practical factors should you consider once you’ve taken the plunge? Marco Palladino provides a working framework of the architectural and organizational decisions senior technologists will need to make in order to solve the right problems for their business. Read more.

Serverless doesn’t mean no servers. It’s a metaphor for a new way of building applications. Pratik Patel explains how serverless fits into the world of microservices and examines the pyramid of application development and deployment. You'll then put on your architect hat to look at serverless options and how they impact applications architecture. Read more.

Communicating about architecture to non-IT and business stakeholders is a valuable skill for architects. After all, many architectural decisions are made by others, so they need to be informed with clear, honest, intelligible, and helpful information and advice. Jochem Schulenklopper shares theory and practical tips on eight facets of the visual communication of architecture. Read more.

Microservices is a popular but vague term. Definitions of microservices can vary depending on what you want them to accomplish and how you want them to communicate with each other. Join Mike Amundsen to learn about the three types of microservices, see what makes them unique, and discover when you deploy each of them. Read more.

Ashley Ward details the security advantages of containers relative to traditional architectures, covering what makes containers more secure, the changing nature of the threat landscape for cloud-native technology, and how the combination of container platforms like OpenShift with purpose-built security solutions lets organizations deliver more secure software faster than ever before. Read more.

We don't yet have an adequate language for describing serverless architectures. Today, we use informal diagrams in which no precise meaning can be attached to the diagram as a whole or to any particular element. Asher Sterkin explains why this is a problem and what we can do about it. Read more.

How can Mozilla evolve its products and capabilities to serve the global, human-driven internet of the future? The company is guided by its mission and supported by the capabilities of its staff and community. Michael Van Kleeck dives into how Mozilla uses its version of enterprise architecture to wisely explore, evaluate, and pivot to and from future opportunities. Read more.

Continuous delivery for 12-factor microservices works by design. When you can architect a solution for continuous delivery, you control all the angles. But what do you do when you don’t have that luxury? Brad Topol explains how modernizing existing IT infrastructure with containers enables you to manage change through continuous delivery and reduce ongoing operational costs. Read more.