Engineering the Future of Software
Feb 25–26, 2018: Training
Feb 26–28, 2018: Tutorials & Conference
New York, NY

Schedule: Microservices sessions

The microservices architectural style continues its dominant popularity amongst architects, both for new and migration projects, because it offers unique benefits. Most architects have built the “Hello, World” microservices architecture, and now need to solve real problems. We focus on next generation microservices problems: transaction boundaries, service granularity, frameworks and other supporting infrastructure, migration, and a host of other common yet vexing problems. What is the appropriate size for services, and how can architects analytically discover it? Should developers move to containers and tools like Kubernetes? What impact does business and technology change have on architecture?

9:00am–12:30pm Monday, February 26, 2018
Location: Regent
Secondary topics:  Best Practice, Overview
Mike Amundsen (Amundsen.com, Inc.)
Average rating: ***..
(3.86, 7 ratings)
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.
1:30pm–5:00pm Monday, February 26, 2018
Location: Mercury Ballroom
Secondary topics:  Case Study, Hands-on
Tom Hofte (Xebia), Marco van der Linden (Xebia)
Average rating: ****.
(4.00, 1 rating)
A public API is a new type of service that extends the business model beyond traditional boundaries. Tom Hofte and Marco van der Linden walk you through designing a resource model for a public API. You'll then work in teams to design an API for a fictional case study. Read more.
1:30pm–5:00pm Monday, February 26, 2018
Location: Beekman Parlor
Secondary topics:  Best Practice, Hands-on
Daniel Bryant (Datawire), Andrew Morgan (Independent)
Average rating: ****.
(4.50, 6 ratings)
Testing microservices is challenging. Dividing a system into components naturally creates interservice dependencies, and each service has its own performance and fault-tolerance characteristics that need to be validated during development and the QA process. Daniel Bryant and Andrew Morgan share the theory, techniques, and practices needed to overcome this challenge. Read more.
10:45am–12:15pm Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Location: Regent
Secondary topics:  Best Practice
Allen Holub (Holub Associates)
Average rating: ****.
(4.26, 23 ratings)
If you still use large up-front design phases, you'll likely encounter problems with your design as you implement. The solution is to build around a domain-focused metaphor that allows for incremental changes while maintaining coherence throughout. Allen Holub demonstrates how to develop an effective and coherent architecture incrementally as the code evolves. Read more.
1:15pm–2:05pm Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Location: Mercury Ballroom
Secondary topics:  Case Study, Overview
Average rating: ***..
(3.17, 6 ratings)
Mario-Leander Reimer explores key JEE technologies that can be used to build JEE-powered data services and walks you through implementing the individual data processing tasks of a simplified showcase application. You'll then deploy and orchestrate the individual data services using OpenShift, illustrating the scalability of the overall processing pipeline. Read more.
1:15pm–2:05pm Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Location: Regent
Secondary topics:  Best Practice, Theoretical
Jonathan Moore (Comcast Cable)
Average rating: ****.
(4.15, 13 ratings)
Rate limiting is the most common capacity management approach for API gateways, but concurrency management is a fundamentally better concept for a variety of reasons. Jon Moore outlines the basic queuing theory behind concurrency management and shares a new algorithm for keeping misconfigured clients from causing trouble for everyone else. Read more.
2:15pm–3:05pm Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Location: Grand Ballroom West
Secondary topics:  Best Practice, Framework-focused
Allard Buijze (AxonIQ)
Average rating: ****.
(4.47, 15 ratings)
Most discussions about implementing microservices start by evaluating the technical options and their challenges. However, the real business value is in functionality. Allard Buijze demonstrates how to build evolutionary microservices, starting with a single application that can be scaled out and distributed once the sensible boundaries are known. Read more.
3:50pm–4:40pm Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Location: Mercury Ballroom
Secondary topics:  Best Practice, Case Study
Georgios Gkekas (ING Bank)
Average rating: ***..
(3.33, 9 ratings)
Georgios Gkekas shares ING's advanced analytics journey to promote modern machine and deep learning techniques internally through a central, best-of-breed technical platform tailored for data science activities. The platform offers only the necessary automated tools to replace the tedious, repetitive, and error-prone steps in a typical data science pipeline. Read more.
3:50pm–4:40pm Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Location: Sutton North
Secondary topics:  Best Practice, Overview
Average rating: **...
(2.30, 20 ratings)
A big part of microservices architecture is decomposing monolithic applications with tightly coupled data models, but moving to decentralized data management is one of the most challenging aspects of a microservices architecture. JP Morgenthal shares strategies for your redesign efforts, the possible pitfalls, and the trade-offs these approaches force architects and engineers to make. Read more.
3:50pm–4:40pm Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Location: Grand Ballroom West
Secondary topics:  Case Study
Tags: cloud, native
Paul Bakker (Netflix)
Average rating: ***..
(3.80, 5 ratings)
How do feature teams (device teams, UI, etc.) connect efficiently to backend services in a microservices architecture? How do you create an edge API that satisfies teams with vastly different requirements? And how do you operate these mission-critical edge services? Paul Bakker discusses these challenges and offers an overview of Netflix's PaaS built specifically for edge services. Read more.
4:50pm–5:40pm Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Location: Mercury Ballroom
Secondary topics:  Framework-focused, Hands-on
Kai Wähner (Confluent)
Average rating: ****.
(4.00, 2 ratings)
Kai Wähner shares a highly scalable, mission-critical infrastructure using Apache Kafka and Apache Mesos: Kafka brokers are used as the distributed messaging backbone; Kafka’s Streams API embeds stream processing into any external application without the need for a dedicated streaming cluster; and Mesos is used as a scalable infrastructure to leverage the benefits of a cloud-native platform. Read more.
4:50pm–5:40pm Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Location: Regent
Secondary topics:  Best Practice, Case Study
Tags: cloud, native
Daniel Bryant (Datawire)
Average rating: ****.
(4.40, 10 ratings)
It's evident that modern software architecture is evolving toward fully component-based architectures, but there are many challenges to delivering such applications in a continuous, safe, and rapid fashion. Daniel Bryant shares a series of patterns to help you identify and implement solutions for continuous delivery of contemporary service-based architectures. Read more.
4:50pm–5:40pm Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Location: Grand Ballroom West
Secondary topics:  Best Practice, Theoretical
Duncan DeVore (Lightbend)
Average rating: ***..
(3.67, 3 ratings)
Duncan DeVore discusses the ins and outs of dealing with modular JVM-based application consistency, distributed state, and identity coherence with techniques such as idempotency, eventual and casual consistency, the CAP theorem, single source of truth, and distributed domain design. Read more.
10:45am–12:15pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Location: Regent
Secondary topics:  Anti-Pattern, Best Practice
Robert Lefkowitz (Warby Parker)
Average rating: ****.
(4.64, 11 ratings)
Robert Lefkowitz offers a overview of technical debt, explaining how to prevent or reduce it, when to increase it, and how to use refactoring to refinance it. Read more.
10:45am–12:15pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Location: Grand Ballroom West
Secondary topics:  Best Practice, Overview
Stephen Pember (Toast)
Average rating: ***..
(3.33, 3 ratings)
Event storage offers many practical benefits to distributed systems providing complete state changes over time, but there are a number of challenges when building an event store mechanism. Stephen Pember explores some of the problems you may encounter and shares real-world patterns for working with event storage. Read more.
1:15pm–2:05pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Location: Regent
Secondary topics:  Best Practice, Overview
Maria Gomez (BCG Digital Ventures)
Average rating: ***..
(3.67, 9 ratings)
Think of this talk as Microservices 201. You know microservices basics and their pros and cons and have maybe even started putting them in production but haven't spent much time thinking about how to maintain them. Maria Gomez explores the most important operational concerns for maintaining microservices and explains why observability helps you maintain a healthy production environment. Read more.
2:15pm–3:05pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Location: Mercury Ballroom
Secondary topics:  Anti-Pattern, Best Practice
Sam Stokes (Honeycomb)
Average rating: ****.
(4.00, 10 ratings)
In the complex world of microservices and distributed systems, we need to understand what our software is doing. Traditional tools, such as logs, read by humans and filtered by crude rules, aren’t powerful enough. Sam Stokes explains that we need new, better tools and why this will also require us to design our systems to give the tools better data. Read more.
2:15pm–3:05pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Location: Regent
Secondary topics:  Overview
Karun Japhet (Sahaj Software), Vinicius Gomes (ThoughtWorks)
Average rating: **...
(2.80, 5 ratings)
Serverless architecture is the latest implementation technique for the increasingly popular event-driven system architecture. Karun Japhet and Vinicius Gomes compare the the multiple cross-functional requirements of serverless and microservices implementations of an event-driven system. Read more.
2:15pm–3:05pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Location: Grand Ballroom West
Secondary topics:  Best Practice
Bernd Rücker (Camunda)
Average rating: ****.
(4.18, 11 ratings)
In distributed systems, some business transactions and even more end-to-end processes stretch across boundaries of individual services. While event-driven choreography leads to nicely decoupled systems, complex event chains cause headaches. Bernd Rücker explains why transforming certain events into commands is beneficial and how to avoid losing sight of larger-scale flows. Read more.
3:50pm–4:40pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Location: Mercury Ballroom
Secondary topics:  Best Practice, Case Study
Suudhan Rangarajan (Netflix)
Average rating: ****.
(4.83, 6 ratings)
As Netflix continues its journey beyond 100M members, the company is rearchitecting its critical Playback API service to better serve its business needs for the next three to five years. Suudhan Rangarajan discusses why and how Netflix rebuilt the Playback API service and outlines a rigorous framework that you can use to reason about your microservice architecture. Read more.
3:50pm–4:40pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Location: Grand Ballroom West
Secondary topics:  Best Practice, Overview
Matthew McLarty (MuleSoft)
Average rating: ****.
(4.17, 12 ratings)
Microservices have taken the software architecture world by storm. Initially driven by a desire for increased delivery velocity and greater scalability, organizations are now recognizing the importance and complexity of securing their microservices. Matt McLarty shares techniques for securing microservice APIs and a practical model you can implement in your organization. Read more.
4:50pm–5:40pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Location: Regent
Secondary topics:  Best Practice, Framework-focused
Christian Posta (solo.io)
Average rating: ****.
(4.67, 3 ratings)
When building microservices, you must solve for a number of critical functions, but the process can be incredibly complex and expensive to maintain. Christian Posta offers an overview of Envoy Proxy and Istio.io Service Mesh, explaining how they solve application networking problems more elegantly by pushing these concerns down to the infrastructure layer and demonstrating how it all works. Read more.