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

Posted on May 31, 2015 by Graham Lea

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.

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 →

Microservices at Tyro: An Evolutionary Tale (Presentation)

Posted on March 20, 2015 by Graham Lea

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: Jez Humble on ‘The Lean Enterprise’

Posted on December 23, 2014 by Graham Lea

Jez Humble (@jezhumble), co-author of ‘Continuous Delivery’, spoke on The Lean Enterprise, specifically “the principles that enable rapid, software-driven innovation at scale” and how to transform organisations. (Slides)

He briefly covered the three horizons method of innovation and highlighted that you actually need to plan and be executing on all 3 at any one time. They also need separate management styles and reporting lines so that they don’t try to squash each other in departmental trade-offs or management bunfights. The two management styles are explore (discover new stuff) and exploit (capitalise on existing assets). Continue reading →

Notes from YOW! 2014: Martin Thompson and Todd L. Montgomery on ‘How Did We End Up Here?’

Posted on December 18, 2014 by Graham Lea

Martin Thompson (@mjpt777) and Todd L. Montgomery (@toddlmontgomery) discussed the state of the software industry at YOW! 2014, including “barbequing” a whole herd of sacred cows. (Slides)

A Dr Dobbs 2010 report into IT project success showed a correlation between higher numbers of people on a project and higher rates of failure. Even the best performing methodologies still have >10% failure. Continue reading →

Notes from YOW! 2013: Michael T. Nygard on ‘Five Years of DevOps: Where are we Now?’

Posted on June 1, 2014 by Graham Lea

I attended Day 1 of YOW! Sydney 2013 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.

Michael T. Nygard (@mtnygard) is probably best known as the author of the 2007 book ‘Release It!‘, which teaches developers how to look beyond just getting their code working and instead design it from the outset to handle the harsh conditions of production environments. He has since become a DevOps luminary and now works at Cognitect. He spoke at YOW! 2013 about ‘Five Years of DevOps: Where are we Now?’.

Michael started off setting the timeline by pointing out that Chef and Puppet were preceded by CFEngine in about 1993!

He explained how his own experience has contributed to his DevOps insight: he worked as a Dev in Ops for some time, showing the Ops team how to solve some of their problems with Dev-like approaches, but also finding lots of problems with the way Devs created software, which was the chief inspiration for his book. Continue reading →

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Graham Lea

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