Sam Newman's Blog, page 4

ThoughtWorks Tech Radar Released & Selected Blips

I get to do lots of fun things as part of my day job at ThoughtWorks. One of them is that I get to help out on the creation of the ThoughtWorks technical radar as part of my membership of our Technical Advisory Board (TAB). We put one of these out every six months or so, and the most recent edition has just gone live.

The radar itself is basically a series of 'blips' broken into quadrants and rings. The rings show more or less whether or not we think the technology is a good idea or mature enough for mainstream use (Hold, Assess, Trial, and Adopt). The quadrants give some basic categorisation (Techniques, Tools, Platforms, and Languages & Frameworks). The process behind creating the radar is now pretty slick (we've been at this a while), but to the outside observer they'd probably just see a bunch of grownups arguing around a giant whiteboard. Each of us brings our candidates to our face to face meeting, and argues the merits for their inclusion - around 120 blips make it into the final version, but twice as many don't make the cut.

The important thing to understand is that the radar is not trying to be either objective nor comprehensive. It represents to an extent what ThoughtWorkers are interested in (many of the blips come from our co-workers), but also what the opinionated people in the room want to argue for. So inconsistencies abound! You can get more information on how we select things, and why certain things fade, in the FAQ over on the website.

The radar itself does a good job of highlighting the various trends we spotted when looking at the blips as a whole. But I thought it would be good to pull out a few of the blips that really interested me personally.

Backends For Frontends - Techniques, Trial

During my research into microservices this was one of the patterns that emerged. A way to avoid the perils of a single-purpose API backend, a Backend-For-Frontend (BFF) is instead a single-purpose API which is paired with a specific user interface. Hat tip to Phil Cal��ado for naming the pattern based on his work at SoundCloud! I mention it in the book, but plan a more in-depth study of the pattern which should be out in a week or so (perhaps sooner!).

Radar Link

SysDig - Tools, Trial

SysDig - and we're talking about the open source command-line tool here, rather than it's commercial parent SysDig Cloud - is awesome. A plugable CLI for common sys admin tasks (with helpful stuff for working with Docker too), if all it offered was a more uniform interface to a bunch of useful commands I'd be interested. What I love about it though is it's ability to capture trace files from a machine and interrogate them later on. This means if a machine gets wedged in prod you can grab a trace file, tear it down and restart another one to get the site up again, but still have the information you need to find out what happened. The overview video below is well worth a look���

Radar Link

AWS Lambda - Platforms, Trial

AWS Lambda is, in my opinion, the first time that AWS have really got close to a decent developer-ready platform as a service. Beanstalk is less of a PAAS offering, more of a wizard over infrastructure, which most teams end up bailing on. Lambda is something else again. Lambda allows you to spin up very short lived processes to respond to either an event or an API call. When no requests are coming in, you aren't running anything, and not getting charged for it either. For stateless processes especially, such as you might find in abundance in the average microservice architecture, lambda has the potential to be incredibly powerful.

Radar Link

Let's Encrypt - Tools, Assess

We all know that HTTPS is a good idea for public facing websites, and even internal services, but managing certificates is a pain! Let's Encrypt is a new signing authority which aims to lower the barrier to entry for protecting sites with HTTPS. They do this in two ways. Firstly, they're free. Secondly, and more importantly, the provide a fully automated way to issue and renew certificates via their command-line interface! In beta right now it should be generally available by the end of the year.

Radar Link

Go Get It!

So, if I've done enough to wet your appetite, head over to the website to see the latest edition of the radar with much more to take in. There is even a PDF download available too for offline reading and printing!

No Silver Bullets - A ThoughtWorks Podcast

Several weeks ago I was in New York along with some ThoughtWorks' colleagues to put together the latest version of our Tech Radar. Every six months or so we come together to argue about technology and try and distill down some (purposely subjective) viewpoints. In a brief gap between sessions, Erik Doernenburg and I sat down to record an episode of the ThoughtWorks Podcast on the subject of microservices, the cloud, and how neither are the silver bullets that some people claim. Turns out Fred Brooks is still right.

If you subscribe to the ThoughtWorks podcast you'll get the episode (and may others) beamed straight to your personal playback device. Alternatively, you can head over to soundcloud and listen there, or use the embedded version below.

The new version of the Tech Radar that we were working on will be available any day now - I'll make sure to make an announcement here when it goes live!

Magpie Talkshow Episode 2 - Venkat Subramaniam

In this week's episode, I speak to Venkat Subramaniam. Venkat seems to have the stamina of 5 normal people - whenever I start to feel sorry for myself about my own hectic schedule, I look at what Venkat is up to and realise that I have no cause to complain. Aside from being a serial author, and conference speaker, Venkat also finds time to do consulting and training too, all while continuing to be incredibly passionate about his work. In this interview we talk about many things, but in particular functional programming and how you might be able to try it out in environments that are otherwise a bit more traditional.

We caught up in what I thought would be a nice quiet location at NDC Oslo, only to find that I had placed us next to a coffee machine. I'll get this right one day.

If you want to know more about his work or what he is up to, you can head over to his website at agiledeveloper.com

Magpie Talkshow Episode 1 - Lynn Langit

In the first episode of The Magpie Talkshow, I interview Lynn Langit.

Lynn focuses both on data engineering and the cloud, and we discuss both, as well as her work with the Teach Kids Programming organisation. I'm also pretty sure she's the first person I've met who is a Microsoft MVP, a Google Developer Expert, and an AWS Community Hero���

If you want to know more about the Teach Kids Programming project, or the associated open source projects we talk about on the podcast, check out their homepage or take a look at some of their open source projects. I particulary liked the use of Code Envy to really lower the barrier to entry for their projects. Take a look at the Java courseware for example - click the Code Envy button and an IDE launches all set up for you to make your contribution from right in the browser! Although I've been sniffy about them in the past, as browsers have got faster, I'm more and more convinced that cloud-based IDEs are the future���

Introducing The Magpie Talkshow

Picture source, license

I'm very fortunate in that I get to travel pretty extensively. Quite often, I'm heading overseas on a long trip (and from Australia, it's always a long trip) to head to some conference or other. As lucky as I am to have these oppurtunities, all this travel does have it's downsides. I'm away from home alot, and jetlag kills. With the amount of travel I'd done this year I had to really ask myself if I was really getting the most of the experiences when I went overseas.

I love speaking at conferences though, and meeting all the fellow speakers and attendees. I learnt so much from meeting new people, so started thinking about what I could do to capture those great chats I got to have with all these interesting people. Simply writing up my experiences didn't seem to make sense. Conferences are hectic experiences, and the idea that I can take notes and write them up later is a nice idea but one that doesn't really stack up in practice. Instead I thought I could try experimenting with a different sort of media - why not just record the conversations I was having?

So, the Magpie Talkshow. It's me, interviewing someone interesting for 20-30 minutes at a time. Recorded at the conference itself, often in fairly noisy circumstances. I have around ten interviews already lined up with more to come, and I plan to release them on a weekly basis.

My first interview is with cloud guru (and I think she deserves the term) Lynn Langit. I recorded the conversation with Lynn, along with three other interviews at NDC Oslo. Coming up in future weeks I'll be talking to Neal Ford about odd carrear paths, Venkat Subramaniam about functional programming, and Irina Guberman about Erlang and not being aloud to play with robots.

You can follow the podcast at soundcloud, subscribe at iTunes or just grab the feed directly. If you do like the podcast then please do leave a comment and perhaps a rating on iTunes!

Conferences for the rest of 2015

Picture source, license

The end of the year seems to bring a pile-up of conferences, and 2015 is no exception. I've a pretty full agenda, and unfortuntately had to turn down the chance to speak at a bunch of interesting events due to clashes. That said, the upcoming events are all excellent, and I'm looking forward chatting to as many people as I can while I'm there.

��redev - Sweden, 3rd-6th November

I spoke at ��redev a few years back and enjoyed it greatly, so I'm very glad to be back in Malm�� again this year. I'll be presenting two talks. The first, is a new talk for this year, AppSec and Microservices. Security in the space of distributed systems has been an interest of mine throughout 2015, and an area I've wanted to dive into more given the amount of uncertainty out there around how to approach it. The talk is half introduction to application securirty, half focus on microservices - I found that many developers (myself included!) don't always have a basic understanding of what application security includes, so providing some framing is important.

The second is the The Principles Of Microservices, which has proven to be my most popular talk ever I think! I've managed to make sure I can be around for most of the conference itself, only missing Friday afternoon - the schedule looks excellent. I'll also be finding some time to sign a few copies of the Building Microservices book too and the O'Reilly stand.

Agile Days Italy, 6th-7th November

This conference was actually started by an old colleague of mine, Marco Abis. Although Marco isn't actively involved any more I'd always hoped to speak there. This will also be my first conference in Italy after unfortunately having to cancel a trip to Lake Como back in 2007! Here I'll be reprising my QCon Sao Paulo keynote Microservices - An Unexpected Journey.

Devoxx Belgium, 11th November

My visit to Devoxx Belgium will be very brief unfortuntately as I have to head off for some client work. I'll only be there for the morning of the Wednesday, presenting The Principles Of Microservices. O'Reilly should have some signed copies of the book to give away too. It's a shame as I really enjoyed Devoxx Poland and had hoped to stay longer, but November's schedule is so packed I couldn't manage it. Next year I hope!

Yow! 2015 - Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne in December

It's nice to finish a year with a local conference, and the Yow! conferences are thoroughly excellent. The event is actually a three city tour covering Brisbane, Melbourne and my home town of Sydney, with a two day conference being run in each location. In a nice touch, the organisers tweak the timings of each of the three conferences so speakers can make sure they see every talk if they want to!

I'll be presenting my second new talk of the year, Deploying and Scaling Microservices This is a deep dive into deployment issues, where I try and explain what mesos is, amongst other things. Hopefully it'll all make sense! I'll also be co-presenting a workshop at Yow (although just in Sydney and Melboure), Docker In Production, with ThoughtWorks colleagues and Kiru Samapathy and Clarence Bakirtzidis. Kiru and Clarence created the initial workshop, and I'm joining them to help update it ahead of Yow (Docker moves pretty fast!). It's an excellent hands-on tutorial they created and I'm really looking forward to helping evolve it further.

And Beyond���

I also have a number of conferences lined up in 2016 too. Some of these events haven't yet announced their lineups yet so I'll wait till they do before I announce anything here, and I'll make sure to keep my events page updated so you can see where I'll be going next.

Video Series - Principles Of Microservices

I've been interested in trying to find different ways to reach people. There was a time, not that long ago, that the best way to reach an audience with ideas in the software development community was to get a paper published in a journal and speak at a conference. Nowadays we have a vast array of conferences where we can speak, from local user groups to huge, industry conferences like Java One. The internet has killed off most of the industry dead tree magazines, and while computing books still sell, they are selling far fewer copies than they used to. But the information available to us as practioners is growing rapidly via other channels.

Meanwhile the mechanisms we can use to communicate our ideas is changing rapidly too, and I wanted to try a few experiments to see how effective things other than the written word are at getting ideas across. The second experiment is coming soon (although those of you on twitter will already have gotten a sneak peak), but the first thing I wanted to try in this area was video.

While I may well try a pluralsight-style screencast at somepoint, O'Reilly offered me the chance to do a short video course for them as part of their Software Architecture Series. Based on my talk, The Principles Of Microservices the almost 3 hour long series is broken up into chunks making it (I hope) easy to digest, perhaps during coffee breaks, over lunch, or on your daily commute. It goes into a lot more depth than the talk itself, as I also talk about the pros and cons of microservices and discuss whether or not they might be right for you. I'm really happy with the resulting quality - something I can take little credit for!

You can buy the DRM-free video directly from O'Reilly, or else access the entire series with a Safari Bookshelf account (which is excellent value given the huge amount of content available there). You can also get a free preview of the video too so you can try before you buy. Feedback, as always, is welcome!

Service Discovery Paper

I recently contributed to a paper put out by ex-colleage and now CEO of HighOps, Marco Abis, entitled Service Discovery: 6 questions to 4 experts. In it, Nitesh Kant (Netflix), Jeff Lindsay (Glider Labs), Eberhard Wolff (innoQ) and I share our opinions of what service discovery is, and the current state of tooling in this area. It's well worth a read - Marco did a good job of pulling together something coherent from my ramblings, and I found the other contributions to be very insightful.

Q&A and Book Giveaway At JavaRanch

This week the kind folks over at JavaRanch are giving away four copies of Building Microservices. As part of the promotion, I'll also be answering questions on microservices over in their design forum. It's only the first day and already the questions are coming in thick and fast. I'll collate them all at the end of the week, but if you want to see some of what's been going on already you could do worse than head over to the forum, or perhaps even just see my replies.

Building Microservices translations on the way

I've been extremely gratified that Building Microservices has found a good audience, and the feedback I've had so far has made all the work behind it very worthwhile. Ever since the book was made available in early access, barely a month or two has gone by without someone asking me about translations into different languages. Fortunately, today I have some good news.

As of today, there are plans to translate the book into 6 different languages, with at least one more being discussed. Here are the planned translations, and potential release dates:

Chinese Complex (eta Q2 2016)
Chinese Simplified (eta Q3 2016)
German (eta Q2 2016)
Japanese (eta Q1 2016)
Korean (eta Q1 2016)
Polish (eta Q2 2016)

Please note that these ETAs are indicative only, and all of this may change!

These translations are being done by local publishers, and for some of them the terms aren't quite finalised so I can't share the details of who will be doing the work yet, but when I can I'll provide all the details on this site.

For India, although most computer books are published in English, it is common practice for them to be republished locally to keep costs down, as shipping books from the US ends up resulting in a very expensive product for the local market. I haven't yet got confirmation if this is happening, but as and when I do I'll make sure to let you all know.

Finally, if you want details of translations into languages not mentioned here, and might even want to help with such a project, then please get in touch!