Building Microservices Quotes

“Avoid database integration at all costs. Understand the trade-offs between REST and RPC, but strongly consider REST as a good starting point for request/response integration. Prefer choreography over orchestration. Avoid breaking changes and the need to version by understanding Postel’s Law and using tolerant readers.”
― Sam Newman, Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems

“Most CMSes are pretty bad even at doing page layout, typically providing drag-and-drop tools that don’t cut the mustard. And even then, you end up needing to have someone who understands HTML and CSS to fine-tune the CMS templates. They tend to be terrible platforms on which to build custom code.”
― Sam Newman, Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems

“If there is too much sharing, our consuming services become coupled to our internal representations. This decreases our autonomy,”
― Sam Newman, Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems

“I have also seen many a team’s morale and productivity destroyed by having a mandated framework thrust upon them. In a drive to improve code reuse, more and more work is placed into a centralized framework until it becomes an overwhelming monstrosity.”
― Sam Newman, Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems

“A cynic might suggest that vendors co-opted (and in some cases drove) the SOA movement as a way to sell more products, and those selfsame products in the end undermined the goal of SOA.”
― Sam Newman, Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems

“Jon Eaves at RealEstate.com.au in Australia characterizes a microservice as something that could be rewritten in two weeks, a rule of thumb that makes sense for his particular context.”
― Sam Newman, Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems

“The evolutionary architect is one who understands that pulling off this feat is a constant balancing act. Forces are always pushing you one way or another, and understanding where to push back or where to go with the flow is often something that comes only with experience. But the worst reaction to all these forces that push us toward change is to become more rigid or fixed in our thinking.”
― Sam Newman, Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems

“Postel’s Law (otherwise known as the robustness principle), which states: “Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.”
― Sam Newman, Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems

“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.”
― Sam Newman, Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems

“Architects are responsible for a lot of things. They need to ensure there is a set of principles that can guide development, and that these principles match the organization’s strategy. They need to make sure as well that these principles don’t require working practices that make developers miserable. They need to keep up to date with new technology, and know when to make the right trade-offs. This is an awful lot of responsibility. All that, and they also need to carry people with them — that is, to ensure that the colleagues they are working with understand the decisions being made and are brought in to carry them out. Oh, and as we’ve already mentioned: they need to spend some time with the teams to understand the impact of their decisions, and perhaps even code too. A tall order? Absolutely. But I am firmly of the opinion that they shouldn’t do this alone. A properly functioning governance group can work together to share the work and shape the vision.”
― Sam Newman, Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems