Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems

by Sam Newman

we should think of our role more as town planners than architects for the built environment. The role of the town planner should be familiar to any of you who have played SimCity before. A town planner’s role is to look at a multitude of sources of information, and then attempt to optimize the layout of a city to best suit the needs of the citizens today, taking into account future use. The way he influences how the city evolves, though, is interesting. He does not say, “build this specific building there”; instead, he zones a city. So as in SimCity, you might designate part of your city as an industrial zone, and another part as a residential zone. It is then up to other people to decide what exact buildings get created, but there are restrictions: if you want to build a factory, it will need to be in an industrial zone. Rather than worrying too much about what happens in one zone, the town planner will instead spend far more time working out how people and utilities move from one zone to another.