On Friday, I had the privilege of presenting at the very first Microservices conference – muCon. In my talk, Engineering Sanity into Microservices, I spoke about the technical issues surrounding state in distributed systems as a whole, how these become a bigger problem as the number of deployed services goes up, and a few suggested patterns that will help you stay sane. The video is now available on the Skilllsmatter site (registration required).
MuCon was a really enjoyable single-topic conference, the talks ranged from high-level CTO-type overviews all the way to the gory details, and war stories. It will be interesting to turn up next year to hear more of the latter.
My biggest takeaway was from Greg Young’s presentation The Future of Microservices, where he spoke about Conway’s Law. As a reminder:
Organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations
— M. Conway
The topical corollary to which he explained as (I paraphrase):
Siloed organizations will never be able to get the benefits of a microservice architecture, as it does not correspond to their communication structures.
Read that again, and really let it sink in.
I will put a layer of interpretation on this: SOA is absolutely not dead. It is a useful tool for highly compartmentalized organizations. Microservices is not its replacement. They are two different tools for different organizational types.
That insight alone was worth turning up for.