Notes from YOW! 2014: From Monoliths to Microservices at REA

I attended YOW! Sydney 2014 and thought some people might get something useful out of my notes. These aren’t my complete reinterpretations of every slide, but just things I jotted down that I thought were interesting enough to remember or look into further.

Microservices at REA (Real Estate Australia)Beth Skurrie (@bethesque) from DiUS, Evan Bottcher (@evanbottcher) from Thoughtworks and Jon Eaves (@joneaves) from REA group spoke about migrating realestate.com.au to a microservices architecture. (Slides, Video)

Why REA migrated to microservices

They started by talking about why they started doing microservices:

  • They had a long release cycle,
  • they were doing coupled releases,
  • with coupled rollbacks,
  • and they had a long defect fix time.

How do you get self-empowered teams to change the whole architecture?

However, there was a realisation that changing things at REA is a bit hard, partly because the teams are very self-empowered, they’re trusted, and they value their independence.

In order to convince teams that trying a new architecture was a good idea, they came up with a vision of where they wanted to go, which included: Continue reading

Microservices at Tyro: An Evolutionary Tale (Presentation)

In February, I presented a talk at the Sydney Microservices Meetup titled “Microservices at Tyro: An Evolutionary Tale”.

Microservices at Tyro

I wanted to talk mostly about things we’ve been doing with microservices at Tyro Payments over the last year, but also about the almost 10 years of practice with distributed computing that has led us towards what we’re doing today.

I’ve merged my slides and the audio from the talk into a video, which you can watch below. If you’re more the reading type, there’s a transcript from the talk beneath the video. My talk goes for 40 minutes and then there’s 20 minutes of Q&A.

The talk covers:

  • Who is Tyro Payments?
  • Why are we doing Microservices?
  • Tyro’s Architecture History
  • Current development in Microservices
  • Tyro Microservices Practices
  • Asynchronous Communication Strategies
  • Helping Out Ops
  • Microservices Technologies and Patterns
  • Challenges we’ve been having at Tyro
  • Microservices pre-requisites

Continue reading

Notes from YOW! 2014: Jez Humble on ‘The Lean Enterprise’

I attended YOW! Sydney 2014 and thought some people might get something useful out of my notes. These aren’t my complete reinterpretations of every slide, but just things I jotted down that I thought were interesting enough to remember or look into further.

A man in a suit, who probably works for an enterprise, running in a marathon and looking very agileJez Humble (@jezhumble), co-author of ‘Continuous Delivery’, spoke on The Lean Enterprise, specifically “the principles that enable rapid, software-driven innovation at scale” and how to transform organisations. (Slides)

He briefly covered the three horizons method of innovation and highlighted that you actually need to plan and be executing on all 3 at any one time. They also need separate management styles and reporting lines so that they don’t try to squash each other in departmental trade-offs or management bunfights. The two management styles are explore (discover new stuff) and exploit (capitalise on existing assets). Continue reading

Notes from YOW! 2014: Martin Thompson and Todd L. Montgomery on ‘How Did We End Up Here?’

I attended YOW! Sydney 2014 and thought some people might get something useful out of my notes. These aren’t my complete reinterpretations of every slide, but just things I jotted down that I thought were interesting enough to remember or look into further.

Cows standing in front of a burning barn.Martin Thompson (@mjpt777) and Todd L. Montgomery (@toddlmontgomery) discussed the state of the software industry at YOW! 2014, including “barbequing” a whole herd of sacred cows. (Slides)

A Dr Dobbs 2010 report into IT project success showed a correlation between higher numbers of people on a project and higher rates of failure. Even the best performing methodologies still have >10% failure. Continue reading

Notes from YOW! 2013: Michael T. Nygard on ‘Five Years of DevOps: Where are we Now?’

I attended Day 1 of YOW! Sydney 2013 and thought some people might get something useful out of my notes. These aren’t my complete reinterpretations of every slide, but just things I jotted down that I thought were interesting enough to remember or look into further.

Small child in a field looking into the distance with binoculars, as someone surveying the current state of DevOps probably wouldn't do.Michael T. Nygard (@mtnygard) is probably best known as the author of the 2007 book ‘Release It!‘, which teaches developers how to look beyond just getting their code working and instead design it from the outset to handle the harsh conditions of production environments. He has since become a DevOps luminary and now works at Cognitect. He spoke at YOW! 2013 about ‘Five Years of DevOps: Where are we Now?’.

Michael started off setting the timeline by pointing out that Chef and Puppet were preceded by CFEngine in about 1993!

He explained how his own experience has contributed to his DevOps insight: he worked as a Dev in Ops for some time, showing the Ops team how to solve some of their problems with Dev-like approaches, but also finding lots of problems with the way Devs created software, which was the chief inspiration for his book. Continue reading

What is DevOps? … in bullet points, quotes and tweets


Interest in DevOps is booming. I feel like I heard it mentioned as the motivation for some decision at least once a week last year, and it climbed its way into the headlines of most of the newsletters I receive from LinkedIn, Twitter, InfoQ, etc.

Army soldiers pulling hard on a rope in a tug of war. Teams working together in a DevOps environment concentrate on all pulling together in the same direction.

I thought I understood it. It just means Dev and Ops collaborating closer, right? But as it gained more and more attention, I realised it must be a movement, not just a simple idea, so I set out to discover what DevOps was really about.

This blog is my summary of what I’ve learned from reading about DevOps over the last few months. There are heaps of resources and lots of people making great observations, so what I’ve done is try to distil lots of salient points into bullet-point format to make it easy for people to pick up as much as possible in a short read. Continue reading