My Key Takeaways from APIdays Australia 2016

On March 1 & 2, 2016, I attended APIdays Australia in Melbourne. (Actually, I also spoke! I’ll write more about that later.) I’m a chronic note-taker at conferences and I like writing my notes up afterwards both for my own reflection and so I can share them with others. Here are the key platform and API takeaways I’ve pulled out of my notes from #APIdaysAU16.

Innovation

APIdays Australia 2016 welcome poster: "API days - Platforms for Innovation"Innovation has been established as the main driver of economic change.

If people have to fill out an application to innovate, it’s not going to happen.

An innovation model for organisations based on the way ants achieve the colony’s goals:

  1. Powerful central mission with loose structure
  2. Maximise learning and sharing of learning
  3. Constant experimentation
  4. Freedom to look for the next horizon

Elon Musk: “Failure must be an option. If you’re not failing, you’re not experimenting enough.”

People in your organisation who think differently to others may well be key innovators. Don’t shut them out of the organisation.

Building Platforms

“Platform” is chiefly an idea to expose the core of your business in a way that can be used to compose new business ideas more easily, either by your own business or by others.
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What would a Microservices PaaS Design Look Like?

Is this a Microservice PaaS?

A beekeeper looking at a frame of honeycomb from a hive. This blog looks at how a Microservices PaaS Design might be framed.Last week I wrote about PaaS and Microservices, asking, “Is a Microservices PaaS in our future?” Since then, I’ve had a number of URLs thrown at me along with the question, “Is this what you mean?”

Probably the closest in intent, based in the way they’re marketing themselves, are Giant Swarm. These guys are certainly putting themselves out there as “Simple Microservice Infrastructure”, and I think they’ve made some ground on implementing such a thing by including service discovery as part of their platform.

Does Docker == Microservices Paas Design?

However, my impression from their docs, as I explained in a comment on said previous blog, is that so far they’ve really only built a “Docker-based PaaS”, and are leaving most of the work of building a MSA, in terms of both choosing and configuring technologies, up to the developers of the system. To quote myself again: “in terms of setting me up with an architecture, it stops at ‘You’ve got Docker!'” (I didn’t realise it had service discovery when I wrote this.)

One of the Giant Swarm developers, Timo Derstappen, joined in the conversation. Continue reading