Tag Archives: authorisation

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

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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 →