Tag Archives: software

Is a Microservices PaaS In Our Future?

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Last month at the Sydney Microservices Meetup, the Meetup’s organiser, Yamen Sader, presented a great talk on “A Microservices Reference Architecture“.

My own talk on the night, which was a case study about the evolution of microservices at Tyro Payments, laid out many examples of practices and tools we’ve used, but left it for people to either follow or ignore what we’ve done as they feel led. Yamen’s talk, on the other hand, was deliberately prescriptive, describing by the end what he obviously considers to be a widely-applicable framework – a “microservice platform in a box”, if you will. (He also ranked the importance of his suggestions based on a hilarious scale of Seinfeld characters, so he could recommended some ideas more strongly than others.)

Is a Microservices PaaS In Our Future?

A trendy, blue-lit data centre, the kind of place where it would be cool to run a Microservices PaaSYamen’s talk, as well as being really interesting, left me wondering about the future of microservices development. In particular, it had me wondering whether, at some point in the near future, we’ll see a Microservices Platform as a Service, or MSA-PaaS. I’m now thinking… Continue reading →

Microservices at Tyro: An Evolutionary Tale (Presentation)

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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: Scott Shaw on ‘Avoiding Speedbumps on the Road to Microservices’

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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 "Speed Bump Ahead" sign, akin to Scott Shaw's warnings in his microservices talkScott Shaw (@scottwshaw), Head of Technology at Thoughtworks, spoke about “three of the biggest issues that microservice teams encounter”. (Slides)

Scott began by listing the following as “Basics”:

He said, “If you don’t know about these things you should at least google them before you start doing micro services.”

The speed bumps he talked about were:

  • Data aggregation
  • Access Control & Security
  • Managing Change

Continue reading →

Notes from YOW! 2014: Cameron Barrie on ‘Mobile at Warp Speed’

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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 bright photo taken using a slow exposure in a train tunnel, giving the impression of moving at warp speed, such as in the topic of Cameron Barrie's Mobile talk.Cameron Barrie (@whalec), Managing Director and Principle Mobile Consultant at Bilue, spoke on “how to apply solid engineering practices to your mobile applications by understanding common mistakes made, and how to mitigate against the risks.” (Slides)

Mobile: Move Fast

He said it’s crucial to be able to move fast. If you’re not disrupting, you’re probably being disrupted.

You need to be honest about what moving fast means for your organisation: you can’t start with crappy code and processes and just start moving fast. Continue reading →

Two REST tips for tackling tricky resource examples

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After my post a couple of days ago about the first thing you should know about REST, a friend emailed me with this feedback:

Nice post. It was something I was thinking about just recently and I think I’m guilty of making these mistakes. The example which confused me was verifying a password. I wasn’t sure what HTTP method to use or what the resource was. The request needs to contain a password but doesn’t expect any response other than a 200, does this mean GET is inappropriate?  It doesn’t update anything, unless of course it fails in which case it may update a failed login counter or lock the account. Does this rule out PUT and POST?

Young man in a very uncomfortable hammock, trying hard to pretend to have a REST.Here’s the response I sent him (fleshed out with a little more detail for this blog)…

REST can be easy and REST can be hard

Yep, the examples in my blog were the easy ones. Plenty of hard ones will crop up, where the resource on the server you want to manipulate is not immediately obvious, like the one you’ve pointed out, or where coming up with a good set of URL patterns is not straightforward. As with all things that aren’t easy, spending some extra time on it is usually worth the effort.

Think like a REST Server

I think what can help is to try and think less about what the client is doing (“verifying a password”) and more about what’s happening on the server side. Continue reading →

Do you even know the first thing about REST?

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A sign saying 'REST AREA', with an arrow pointing up and to the right.It’s not unusual to see examples where people think they are “doing REST”, but are not. A lot of people are trying to use simple web technologies in their microservice architectures, but I suspect there’s a prevalent idea that if you are using HTTP and sending JSON back and forth, you’re doing REST, which is simply not the case. (We’re talking about the Representational State Transfer style of software architecture here, in case you’re lost.)

Spring’s REST

Spring’s Web MVC Framework documentation says in the first paragraph: “With the introduction of Spring 3.0, the @Controller mechanism also allows you to create RESTful Web sites and applications…” Further on, introducing its @RestController interface, it says: “It’s a very common use case to have Controllers implement a REST API, thus serving only JSON, XML or custom MediaType content.” So, does creating a web service using a @RestController-annotated class magically make it a RESTful service?
No. Such no.

Not so REST

The big thing I see developers getting wrong when trying to use web technologies for inter-service communication is that they continue to think about operations. Continue reading →

Notes from YOW! 2014: Gojko Adzic on ‘Make Impacts, Not Software’

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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.

Gojko Adzic (@gojkoadzic) spoke about the trouble of aligning strategy and the desired impacts of projects with the implementation of the software.

Palchinsky Principles

An ant carrying a leaf. Ants are known to carry far more than their own weight, a great example of having a big impact.He spent some time discussing the Palchinsky principles, from Russian engineer Peter Palchinsky as documented in Tim Harford’s book ‘Adapt’.

The principles, intended to guide the development of innovations, are:

  1. Variation: We should seek out new ideas and try new things.
  2. Survivability: We should do things on a scale where failure is survivable. (This is why stories should be small. Not so that we can finish them in an iteration, but because they might be wrong.)
  3. Selection: We should seek out feedback and learn from mistakes.

Continue reading →

Notes from YOW! 2014: Jeff Patton on ‘User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story’

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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.

Jeff Patton (@jeffpatton) was billed to present a “fast paced workshop [where] you’ll learn the concepts of story mapping by building a map collaboratively with others”. He shared lots of great insights about stories but (I felt) really only touched on Story Mapping briefly near the end of the time. Still, I collected some good notes about stories that made me re-think a few things…

He started by showing this great list of wrong things he used to think about stories. Stupid stuff Jeff Patton used to belive about Agile stories Continue reading →

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

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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 Microservices Talk by Zhamak Dehghani

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People have started using honeycombs and hex shapes to depict microservices architectures. Who knows why?A couple of weeks ago, I went along with a couple of other Tyro software engineers to hear Zhamak Dehghani speak about microservices at a “YOW Nights” event, hosted by Optivar and sponsored by ThoughtWorks. It was so good that we asked Zhamak if she’d come into the Tyro office and give a re-run for the whole Engineering team and she kindly obliged. What a legend! Thanks again Zhamak!

I’d already read a lot about microservices (MS), mostly thanks to the excellent pages of links put together by Adrian Rossouw and Matt Stine. Zhamak covered a lot of ground that I was already familiar with, but she also touched on many things that were new and interesting to me, so I thought I would write about a few here. Continue reading →