Schedule: Application architecture sessions

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.

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.

Fahran Wallace explores the intersection of programming, architecture, and psychology through the medium of funny-in-retrospect memories, borrowed war stories, and attempts to avoid people swearing at her design choices five years later. Read more.

Launched 10 years ago, the BBC's iPlayer on TV has become the largest iPlayer platform. David Buckhurst and Ross Wilson explore the evolution of the BBC's TV application architecture, from the early days courting different native technologies to the development of an open source library and standards-based platform that supports multiple BBC applications across thousands of TVs. Read more.

Dan Haywood explains how he and a tiny one-and-a-bit-pizza team used Apache Isis—an implementation of the naked objects architectural pattern—to build an invoicing system, Estatio. You'll see what an Apache Isis app looks like in the flesh and learn how Dan and his team manage to keep it modular. Read more.

And you shall do it only once. Exactly once. That's a very common assumption for most of business software. One trigger equals one outcome. Szymon Pobiega explains why duplicate messages are a fact of life in distributed systems (and why no infrastructure can help you). Fortunately, Szymon also shares tips on how to deal with nasty duplicate zombie messages. Read more.

Vladik Khononov shares his experience using the domain-driven design methodology at Plexop, a large-scale marketing system that spans over a dozen of different business domains, from the management of advertising spaces to sales agents’ commissions. Read more.

Credit card fraudsters are always changing their behavior and developing new tactics. For banks, the damage isn’t just financial; their reputations are on the line. So how do they stay ahead of the crooks? Sarah LeBlanc and Hany Elemary explore a system that utilizes continuous delivery for machine learning to allow for rapid experimentation and the deployment of models to catch these fraudsters. Read more.

With cloud-native and microservices architecture gaining wide adoption, asynchronous programming patterns are becoming increasingly important. Irakli Nadareishvili details three major async forms that are relevant in this space—event sourcing, reactiveness, and data streams—defining each pattern, explaining relevant use cases, and exploring differences in implementation. 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.

Tobias Uldall-Espersen and Thomas Krogsgaard Holme explain how they applied microservice architecture and privacy by design principles to break down a monolithic portal containing 50+ products—the Danish national ehealth portal Sundhed.dk—redesign it, and produce a scalable and flexible platform in compliance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Read more.

One of the most interesting and provocative patterns to face the software architecture community is the idea of using event streaming as a source of truth—a pattern where replayable logs provide both communication and storage, splicing the retentive properties of a database into a system designed to share data across teams. Benjamin Stopford explains why this pattern is transformative. Read more.

The architectural principle of CQRS makes great promises about the scalability of applications. Allard Buijze and Nakul Mishra elaborate on these promises and explain how to bring them into practice. Along the way, they provide insight into the challenges Casumo faced while scaling from thousands to billions of events and how they were resolved. Read more.

Microservices provide a way to break up a monolithic architecture into multiple atomic units, allowing an independent scalability of a service. They also provide a better way to divide the domains across multiple teams. Luca Mezzalira explains how to apply the same principles to frontend applications, enabling you to scale up a project with tens of developers without reducing the throughput. Read more.

Event-driven programming has been proven useful in many situations. However, the asynchronous programming model often needs some time to get used to. Marco Emrich explores event concepts in a familiar language and walks you through solving an exciting kata with the help of event-driven programming. Read more.

A RESTful approach to microservices offers a number of benefits. Mike Amundsen walks you through building adaptable microservices that take advantage of the features of REST, including statelessness, self-description, and using hypermedia to discover and modify application state. Read more.