Build Systems that Drive Business
Sep 30–Oct 1, 2018: Training
Oct 1–3, 2018: Tutorials & Conference
New York, NY

Frankenstein's microservices: How to avoid the monster

Michael Hamrah (Namely)
11:35am–12:15pm Tuesday, October 2, 2018
Distributed Systems, Microservices and Containers
Location: Sutton South/Regent Parlor Level: Intermediate
Secondary topics:  Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 3 ratings)

Prerequisite knowledge

  • Familiarity with service design, networking, and development

What you'll learn

  • Explore a set of common elements of a microservice platform that go beyond tools and frameworks that will help you ensure your deployment doesn't end up a monster

Description

Many companies adopt microservices to break down monoliths, but they soon uncover a hidden cost: How do you manage all these new interconnected things popping up? What are good service boundaries? How do you increase reliability when so many more things can go wrong?

Microservices can help you decompose a monolith, enable developer velocity for organizations, and help a system scale. Whether consciously or unconsciously, companies that adopt microservices end up building a platform. If you’re not careful, you end up with a distributed monolith or a set of microliths that become unwieldy and reduce reliability and developer velocity.

Drawing on his experience building microservices at Getty Images, Uber, and Namely, Michael Hamrah identifies as set of common elements of a microservice platform that go beyond tools and frameworks. Michael helps you reduce risk by discussing the other side of microservices: the platform you create to build, deploy, manage, and understand all the small interconnected things you release to production. Join in to learn how tools like gRPC, Envoy, Spinnaker, and Kafka help you compose your microservice system successfully, what you need to think about when designing services, and how to avoid the pitfalls of a distributed monolith. Avoid creating Frankenstein’s monster by understanding elements of a microservice platform. . .so you can sleep at night.

Photo of Michael Hamrah

Michael Hamrah

Namely

Michael Hamrah is the chief architect at Namely, where he’s leading the development of Namely’s platform. A software engineer with more than 15 years of experience, Michael was previously director and principal engineer at Getty Images working on sports, news, and entertainment tools and moved Getty’s Asset Management Platform to the cloud. He was also a senior software engineer at Uber working on metrics and monitoring.