Schedule: Distributed systems 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.

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. Read more.

An Akka expert and a Kubernetes expert walk into a bar. They order drinks and try to figure out which technology is better for building distributed applications. Does Akka clustering have a place in the age of Kubernetes? Does Kubernetes bring any value to those who are building applications using Akka? Adam Sandor and Fabio Tiriticco share research to help answer those questions. 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.

Wenbo Zhu illustrates the key architectural properties and underlying technologies to create and deploy a real-time, stateful application on top of the completely stateless serverless architecture. 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.

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.