Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems

by Sam Newman

Part of us wants recognition, so we borrow names from other professions that already have the recognition we as an industry crave.

When we compare ourselves to engineers or architects, we are in danger of doing everyone a disservice.

Thus, our architects need to shift their thinking away from creating the perfect end product, and instead focus on helping create a framework in which the right systems can emerge, and continue to grow as we learn more.

architects have a duty to ensure that the system is habitable for developers too.

The fact that JSON is a much simpler format means that consumption is also easier. Some proponents also cite its relative compactness when compared to XML as another winning factor, although this isn’t often a real-world issue.

This brings us to what is often the mother of all tangled dependencies: the database.

I would say that in my experience the smarter the PaaS solutions try to be, the more they go wrong.

Make sure you understand the impact your deployment choices have on developers, and make sure they feel the love too.

A test suite with flaky tests can become a victim of what Diane Vaughan calls the normalization of deviance — the idea that over time we can become so accustomed to things being wrong that we start to accept them as being normal and not a problem.1

Although it is unfortunately still a common organizational pattern, I see significant harm done whenever a team is distanced from writing tests for the code it wrote in the first place.

It is hard to have a balanced conversation about the value something adds versus the burden it entails.