In today's fast-paced digital landscape, organizations are constantly striving for agility, scalability, and innovation. Microservices architecture has emerged as a powerful paradigm for achieving these goals. However, the successful implementation of microservices is not solely dependent on technical aspects. It is equally vital to ensure organizational alignment, as misalignment can lead to…
Caching in general is a good practice to improve the responsiveness of the system. But sometimes it can go horribly worng and cause cascading failures leading to bringing the entire system down. Below were such incidents that I encountered: Backend service caches M2M auth tokens which it gets by making a API calls to an Authservice. Auth service introduced a bug in which it returns empty token and…
Companies have a never ending quest to continuously adopt new tools, processes and new architectures with the goal of enabling teams to move fast and build high performing teams. What is a high performing team? If you ask a product manager, they will say "It’s a team that can deliver new value faster". If you ask a Team lead they will say along the lines of "A high performing team can pay down its…
Terminology Observability : Observability is the property of a system to answer either trivial or complex questions about itself. How easily you can find answers to your questions is a measure of how good the system’s observability is. Monitoring : observing the quality of system performance over a time duration Instrumentation : refers to metrics exposed by the internals of the system using code…
Here is the link to my #Dockerccon2020 talk "Monolithic to Microservices + Docker = SDLC on Steroids!"
EWF is another microservice decomposition pattern that I like to use when building services. It stands for Entity, Workflow & Functional services. In simplest terms, it’s an extension of Single Responsibility principle and allows for building independent testable services. To understand this pattern better, let’s start with an example. Imagine I want to write a signup service that allows user to…
Recently I attended an RCA meeting for an incident that happened in prod few weeks back. The issue was somewhat of a 2nd degree failure. To put it in simple terms, lets say a workflow composed of two services - A and B. When user performed an action from the UI, it made a call to Service A which then internally called service B with some parameters based on user preferences. In this case, due to…
Microservice architecture paradigm fits well within the Unix’s first principle/philosophy: “Make one program do one thing well”. We love creating small services which has identity of its own (within a bounded context). These services have their own CI/CD pipelines and provides loose coupling b/w components which significantly improves our ability to deliver code to production. In reality, a…
Microservice architecture comes with a high cost of service dependencies which impacts the overall performance of the system. In a typical setup, when a request hits the service, it first needs to grab data from its dependent apis and after which it will perform more operations and return the final result back to the caller. Dependent apis may further call other apis or talk to a DB in order the…
Thank you folks for raising some great questions. I am consolidating them here for everyone to benefit! How is your experience using Kubernetes? >> Kubernetes seems very powerful and some experts would say its the modern day kernel for container orchestration. Internally, we use Rancher which I believe has Kuberneter support but I don’t think we are using it yet. We have an entire SRE team that…
One of the most important selling point of moving towards microservice architecture is the speed of delivery! Today customers can research products, compare reviews and ultimately switch to better products online with unprecedented ease. To survive in this high customer-focused and fast moving industry, we need our teams to deliver software at an accelerated rate and possibly multiple times in a…
Adoption of microservices is not easy and I have had my own share of painful experiences during the initial phase of the transition. In this blog, I will go over some of factors that can be critical to determine the outcome of such transition. Lack of Engineering Culture - What’s an Engineering Culture anyway? Its a culture that practices lean-principles and further enables osmosis style learning…
Dark-launches and Feature toggles are two great practices to deploy code faster to production and get early feedback. Combined with microservices architecture, it becomes a very powerful tool and once adopted, there is no turning back! You will be thrilled by the speed with which you can build and ship software in a safe manner! In this blog, I will try to explain what these terms means. Dark…
In my previous blog ( Microservices and Testing - Lessons Learned ), I talked about variation in the testing pyramid and how new flavors of Component Tests (with same good characteristics as those of Unit Tests) have gained momentum and are the primarily source for testing the entire µ-service stack in isolation. In this blog I will talk about how we use the same Component-Test setup to run local…
In my previous blog ( Microservices and Testing pyramid ), I talked about the variation in the testing pyramid which is more visible in the microservice stack. In this blog I want to provide some more context as to exactly what is contributing to this variation and share some of the lessons learned in evolving our testing strategy. A traditional testing pyramid has Unit Tests at the bottom…
In this blog, I want to discuss how adoption of microservices as the mainstream development practice has impacted our Developer Experience and share some of the observations and lessons learned. We have come a long way in terms of evolving our tech stack from being a C#/.net heavy Monolithic Enterprise shop to now lean micro services. Today we have hundreds of microservices written in different…
In this blog, I want to talk about how our technology stack has evolved over time while transitioning from Enterprise to adopting Microservice architecture as a main stream development practice and share some of the lessons learned. Tech stack for us has evolved from being a Monolithic Enterprise to Cloud to now Microservices. During Enterprise days, it looked something liked this: At the app…
Adoption of microservices have changed the way we build software. It's a slim down version of SOA and impacts all areas of SDLC. A successful adoption will require mindset change of how we think, design, test, build, deploy and monitor our products. In this post, I want to discuss Testing methodology which took a 180 degree turn for me. Conventional testing pyramid implies that Unit tests are the…