author: @sleepyfox
title: Microservices Day
date: 12-May-2016

On Tuesday NearForm put on their 'Microservices Day' free one-day single-track conference, which was actually better than many paid-for conferences that I've been to in the past. Not only was the quality of the presentations overall very good, but all of the (very professionally produced) videos are available on YouTube:

Playlist of all videos from the day: here

I hope the following precis help you to pick and choose the videos that appeal and provide value to you.

“How to enable organizations to go faster” -- Fred George @fgeorge52 This was one of the best talks of the day. Fred is a very engaging speaker, here he looks at emerging trends in software and how we've moved from delivering in months or years to delivering every 3.5 minutes: "If you think you're fast, you can go faster!". He covers everything from mindset, technology choices, leadership, architecture, HR, devOps, FOSS, radical simplification, furniture and microservices. Lots of good stuff about "migrating away from ugly Rails-things".

“Fighting the Good Fight at the Hot Gates of Micro-Services” -- Adrian Trenaman @adrian_trenaman 300 Microservices at Gilt making $700m/pa flash-sales (low quantity, first-come, first-served, sale every day at noon, viral) "There are no off-the-shelf tools that you can use to run a flash-sales business" - Moved from Ruby -> Java -> Scala. Half of their services <2KLOC including all deployment and test code.

“Solving service discovery: how Node.js microservices can find each other without a registry” -- Richard Rodger @rjrodger Richard has some interesting things to say about using Gossip protocols for service discovery and was promoting their Node.js microservice framework called Seneca.js. He made an interesting observation that the success of the Gossamer Albatross being the first human-powered aircraft to cross the English Channel in 1979 was due to the innovative way in which the inventor developed a system to speed up the iteration of different prototypes of aircraft design.

“Microliths: how to avoid traps in your stack and your culture” -- Jason Melo @jasonmelo Jason talked about the extreme mindset shifts that were necessary to make microservices work at Lifion in embracing the diversity of databases, languages and runtimes in their microservice estate. He also talked about applying the same 'everybody is a tester' mindset to 'everybody is a devOp'. He also talked about the need for replacing chatty REST HTTP traffic with message queues, a topic that recurred throughout the day. They were one of the many using Kafka as a event stream. An interesting topic was their idea of deploying a 'world' which was a manifest of all of their services together with their versions and dependencies, cryptographically signed, versioned in git and a deployable artefact.

“Micro-transformation” -- Clifton Cunningham @clifcunn After lunch there was an interesting talk about TES Global, the Times Educational Supplement - actually a huge business allowing teachers to publish lesson planning materials and share them online, as well as their more well-known educational institution rating periodicals. Clifton talked about how they'd managed to do more with less by building small, highly-cohesive teams and then instead of moving people between projects or products they move the work to the teams. "You're an Enterprise if you have more meetings per week than releases" He listed his five key take-aways for a high-performance business as:

• Programmer Anarchy
• Immutable infrastructure
• Continuous Delivery
• Microservice architecture
• Open Source processes

“Microservices and Containers. How much faster than a VM?!” -- Anne Currie @anne_e_currie Anne's talk was about how the key benefit of containers is not how much easier they make deployment or how they reduce errors due to dissimilarity of environments but about how they enable 'microscaling' or the utilisation of autoscaling of infrastructure by dynamically changing the case-mix of container services on your VM estate allowing high-priority service instances to displace low-priority instances in near real-time according to demand, avoiding the high start-up cost of creating new VMs.

“Autobahn in the cloud” -- Christian Deger @cdeger Christian told us how AutoScout24 - which is Germany's equivalent of AutoTrader - built a radical new microservice platform in the cloud to accelerate their business and become not just a market leader in the Automotive sector but to become an employer of choice by moving from their legacy .NET monolithic architecture to a Scala-based microservice architecture, what they called moving from a 'cash-stack' to a 'talent-stack'.

There were other presentations at the event - for the full list see the playlist referenced at the top of the page - but these were the ones that I enjoyed the most and found most valuable.