QCONSF 2022: Dark Energy, Dark Matter and the Microservices Patterns?! This is a talk that I gave at QCON SF 2022. Dark matter and dark energy are mysterious concepts from astrophysics that are used to explain observations of distant stars and galaxies. The Microservices pattern language - a collection of patterns that solve architecture, design, development, and operational problems — enables software developers to use the microservice architecture effectively. But how could there possibly be a connection between microservices and these esoteric concepts from astrophysics? In this presentati ..read more

Essential characteristics of the microservice architecture: independently deployable The home page of microservices.io lists several essential characteristics of the services that comprise a microservice architecture. This is the first in a series of blog posts that describes each of those characteristics starting with independently deployable. The simplistic definition of independently deployable The simplistic definition of ‘independently deployable’ is a service is packaged as a deployable or executable unit. Examples of a deployable or executable unit include: executable JAR file, WAR fil ..read more

Dark energy, dark matter and microservice architecture collaboration patterns This is a talk that I recently gave at the Skills matter Microservices Matters Community. About dark energy and dark matter Dark energy and dark matter are useful metaphors for the repulsive forces, which encourage decomposition into services, and the attractive forces, which resist decomposition. An architecture must balance conflicting this forces You must balance these conflicting forces when defining a microservice architecture including when designing system operations (a.k.a. requests) that span services. Ab ..read more

My new Windows 365 Cloud PC: Windows 11, Docker Desktop and WSL2 Windows has been a bit of mystery to me ever since I switched to Mac back in 2009. But, I recently need to debug a Windows-related problem with my Manning LiveProject. In order to investigate the problem, I needed a Windows machine that could run Docker for Desktop Windows. I was reluctant to simply buy a Windows laptop so I searched for alternative solutions. This post describes how after trying Parallels and Azure VMs, I picked Windows 365 Cloud PC. Parallels Desktop 17 for Mac - slow and bug I eventually stumbled across the id ..read more

Interview about microservices with Koushik Kothagal (@Java_Brains) I was recently interviewed by Koushik Kothagal (of Java Brains fame) for his new The Artifact podcast. We spent 50 minutes discussing microservices and microservices patterns ..read more

Using scenarios to reinvigorate your microservice architecture This is a talk that I gave at the new Skills matter Microservices Matters Community meetup. It sounds dull but good architecture documentation is essential. Especially when you are actively trying to improve your architecture. For example, I spend a lot time helping clients modernize their software architecture. Yet more often than I like, I’m presented with a vague and lifeless collection of boxes and lines. As a result, it’s sometimes difficult to discuss the architecture in a meaningful and productive way. In this presentation ..read more

Icebergs, the Interface Segregation Principle and microservices An essential characteristic of the microservice architecture is loose design-time coupling. In a loosely coupled architecture, changes to a service rarely require other services to be changed in lockstep. As a result, it’s easier to make changes. What’s more, teams need to spend much less time coordinating their work. If you neglect design-time coupling, you risk creating a distributed monolith, which combines the complexity of the microservice architecture with the friction of a monolith. While such an architectural disaster migh ..read more

The Eventuate Tram Customers and Orders example now runs on Arm/M1 MacBook!! A while back I described how the Eventuate Tram Customers and Orders example did not run on my shiny new M1 MacBook due to problems with flaky Intel-only Docker images. I’m super happy to announce that after updating several Eventuate projects, it now runs successfully. This post summaries the changes that I needed to make. The other articles in this series are: Part 1 - My Apple M1 MacBook: lots of cores, memory and crashing containers Part 2 - Building multi-architecture Docker images for Intel and ARM Part 3 - Con ..read more

Publishing a multi-architecture Docker image for the Eventuate CDC service The Eventuate CDC Service is a key part of the Eventuate Platform. It plays the role of a Message Relay in the Transaction Outbox pattern. It reads messages that are inserted in an OUTBOX table and sends them to the message broker. It also reads inserted into an EVENTS table, which is part of Eventuate’s Event Sourcing implementation, and publishes them to Apache Kafka. The Eventuate CDC service is a Spring Boot application that’s packaged as a Docker image. This post describes how I changed the Eventuate CDC project to ..read more

Publishing multi-architecture base images for services The eventuate-examples-docker-images project publishes Docker base images for the services, such as those in the Eventuate Tram Customers and Orders example application. A service base image has a health check that pings the service’s health check endpoint. It also ensures that a service’s Docker image uses the correct Java version with some suitable heap settings. This post describes how I changed the project to publish a multi-architecture base image for Spring services. I first describe the changes to the Dockerfile. After that, I descr ..read more