Tag Archives: architecture

Notes from YOW! 2014: From Monoliths to Microservices at REA

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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.

Microservices at REA (Real Estate Australia)Beth Skurrie (@bethesque) from DiUS, Evan Bottcher (@evanbottcher) from Thoughtworks and Jon Eaves (@joneaves) from REA group spoke about migrating realestate.com.au to a microservices architecture. (Slides, Video)

Why REA migrated to microservices

They started by talking about why they started doing microservices:

  • They had a long release cycle,
  • they were doing coupled releases,
  • with coupled rollbacks,
  • and they had a long defect fix time.

How do you get self-empowered teams to change the whole architecture?

However, there was a realisation that changing things at REA is a bit hard, partly because the teams are very self-empowered, they’re trusted, and they value their independence.

In order to convince teams that trying a new architecture was a good idea, they came up with a vision of where they wanted to go, which included: Continue reading →

What would a Microservices PaaS Design Look Like?

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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 →

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: 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 →

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 →