Monolith to Microservices with Bite-Sized Kubernetes I recently did CNCF webinar with Leonardo Murillo of Weaveworks. Leo described how to deploy monoliths and microservices on Kubernetes. In particular he described how Kubernetes is flexible enough to handle the quirks of deploying a legacy monolith. I covered the following topics: Developing software for today’s crazy world - the need for IT to deliver software rapidly, frequently, reliably and sustainably Architecture patterns for modern software - the Monolithic architecture and Microservices architecture patterns and when to use it patte ..read more

Finding your inner Vulcan: unemotional decision making with patterns Teams often struggle with making architecture and design decisions. They often end up in endless discussions, which are often emotional and unproductive. The team might also make less than ideal decisions on the basis of personal preferences or fashion. Or worse, the team might be paralyzed by indecision and fail to make a decision at all. This is very human. Vulcans, on the other hand, are known for their logical and unemotional decision making. What’s more, according to ChatGPT: They are also known for their ability to use ..read more

The geometry of microservices - cubes, hexagons, triangles, and more - part 1 One of my favorite talks on the microservice architecture is my JFokus 2020 talk Cubes, Hexagons, Triangles, and More - Understanding Microservices. It uses a series of shapes as visual metaphors to explain key microservice architecture concepts. Let’s have a look at the first two shapes: the success triangle, which provides the motivation for using microservices, and the scale cube, which defines the microservice architecture. The success triangle In order to thrive in today’s crazy world, businesses need to be mo ..read more

Introducing Assemblage - a microservice architecture definition process The essence of applying the Microservice architecture pattern is defining the service architecture: identifying the services, defining their responsibilities, their APIs and their collaborations (with other services). Choosing the right technical architecture - deployment platform, message broker, etc. - also matters. But that’s a far easier and much less important task. That’s because if you define your services incorrectly you will create a fragile, and difficult to maintain distributed monolith that can threaten your or ..read more

Evolving a microservice architecture using dark energy and dark matter forces Let’s imagine that you are developing a microservices-based application and you need to implement a major new feature. For example, your application consists of two services - Order Service and Customer Service - and you want to implement Coupon Management: The Coupon Management subdomain needs to be part of a service. But which service? Blindly adding services leads to the More the Merrier anti-pattern You might automatically implement Coupon Management as a new Coupon Service. After all your application has a MICR ..read more

Understanding an architecture: part 2 - user stories and scenarios This is part 2 in a series of article about understanding and documenting an architecture. The other articles in the series are: Understanding an architecture: part 1 - system context In the previous article I described how I begin the process of understanding the architecture of a client’s application by learning about (and documenting) the system context. The system context describe the actors - humans and applications - that use the application to accomplish their goals and the external applications/services that are used ..read more

OMG are you still using Rational Rose? Recently, I wrote the first in a series of articles about how to understand and document an architecture. One amusing comment on the post was “OMG are you still using Rational Rose?”. The answer is, of course, no. I’m actually using PlantUML. In this article, I’ll explain why I think UML is useful and why I like PlantUML. Architecture is elements and relations Len Bass and colleagues at the Software Engineering Institute define software architecture as follows: The software architecture of a computing system is the set of structures needed to reason abou ..read more

Understanding an architecture: part 1 - system context Recently, I was talking with a friend, who is a software architect, about his upcoming new job. He asked me about how I learn a new architecture. I walked him through the process that I use during a microservices consulting engagement to understand a client’s existing architecture. This is the first of a series of posts that explain the steps of the process. These steps also correspond to sections of an architecture document. I’ll use the FTGO application from my Microservices Patterns book as an example. Here is the vision statement for t ..read more

CxOs neglect architecture at their peril To paraphrase Marc Andreessen software has eaten the world. It’s increasingly rare to find a business that is not dependent on software. As a result, it’s essential that an organization’s leaders pay attention to software architecture. What is architecture? Len Bass and colleagues at the Software Engineering Institute - pioneers in the discipline of softeware architecture - define software architecture as follows: The software architecture of a computing system is the set of structures needed to reason about the system, which comprise software element ..read more

Scripting with JBang instead of Python I recently needed to write some scripts to automate some updates to Microservices.IO. I normally write scripts in Python (or perhaps bash, if they simple) since it’s easy to use and has lots of handy libraries. But this time I decided to try JBang, which is a tool that let’s you write scripts in Java. Installing JBang First, I installed JBang using SDKMAN!: $ sdk install jbang Creating a JBang script Second, I created the script: $ jbang init Example.java This command creates the executable file Example.java. $ ./Example.java [jbang] Building jar ..read more