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Groundbreakers Podcast
October 17, 2018
Podcast: On Microservices Design and Implementation
"Like buying a Ferrari and towing it around with a horse."
That's how Java Champion and Microservices Patterns (Manning Publications) author Chris Richardson describes the approach some organizations take to implementing microservices. It's often a matter of faulty motivation.
In helping organizations around the world get started with microservices, the first question Chris asks his clients is, "Why do you want microservices?" The responses are often surprising. "I've talked to people who viewed microservices as magic pixie dust. You sprinkle it on things and everything will be better," Chris reports.
Another problem is the mistaken belief that the goal is microservices. "Microservices is a means to an end," Chris says. From a DevOps perspective, "there are two really good metrics," Chris explains. "One of them is deployment frequency, how often you're deploying into production. The other one is lead time, the time from commit to deploy. To me, those are the two metrics that you should be optimizing. Microservices is the way to get there."
Oracle Developer Champion Lucas Jellema, CTO and consulting IT architect with AMIS Services, also advises against diving blindly into microservices. "First step back and consider why you are thinking about microservices in the first place," Lucas says. "You choose microservices because there are issues you want to overcome, challenges you want to deal with. In the end, the only thing that really matters is that IT provides business value, and you can only provide business value if you have properly running applications that provide you with the right business functionality. The typical challenge that we try to address using microservices is to evolve that functionality in an agile fashion without much effort and without too much cost. If microservices can help with that then we want to have them. But we don't want to have them because everyone is talking about them."
Fellow Developer Champion Luis Weir, CTO of the Oracle Practice at Capgemini sees the human factor as the greatest challenge in microservice adoption and development. One of his customers has "a very clear need to implement this style of architecture," Luis says. "But it's been a nightmare to align the teams and make them work in a way that's aligned with the this architecture style, as opposed to operating in a very traditional ITL style where you need to handoff between three different teams and and do everything in a waterfall way."
Luis finds that many organizations are stuck in the past. "Not all organizations are into the DevOps way of doing things," Luis explains. Some departments may be adopting agile practices and the like. "But the IT side of the organization, in many cases, is not. They're trying to digitalize a lot of legacy. So it's a little more complicated. You're dealing with people, educating them on how to become more agile or how to think about breaking an elephant into smaller pieces." Luis admits that it's not easy.
What makes the transition so challenging, according to Oracle ACE Sven Bernhardt, a solution architect with OPITZ Consulting, is the need for "total cultural change" within the organization. "They must embrace the adaptability, the changeability. They must have a different fault tolerance, a different culture for dealing with software failures and also with failures on decisions with respect to technologies which are used for implementing a specific business functionality as a microservice," Sven explains. Too many organizations underestimate the necessary cultural change, and find that switching to a DevOps mindset is tough slog.
But that's just a fraction of what you'll learn in this podcast, as the panel addresses ways to meet the various challenges found in getting to microservices. Listen!
BTW: Each of the panelists will present sessions are Oracle Code One and Oracle OpenWorld 2018. See the list of sessions, below.
The Panelists
Listed alphabetically
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Sven Bernhardt Oracle ACE Solution Architect, OPITZ Consulting   Code One Sessions
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Lucas Jellema Oracle Developer Champion Oracle ACE Director CTO, Consulting IT Architect, AMIS Services   Code One Sessions
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Chris Richardson Java Champion Founder, Eventuate, Inc. Code One Session
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Luis Weir Oracle Developer Champion Oracle ACE Director CTO, Oracle Practice, Capgemini Code One Sessions
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Additional Resources
- Podcast: Are Microservices and APIs Becoming SOA 2.0?
- Podcast Show Notes: Microservices Roundtable
- Vibrant and Growing: The Current State of API Management
- Podcast: DevOps to NoOps: State of Play
- Oracle Code One: Information and Registration
Coming Soon
Groundbreakers Neha Narkhede, Charles Nutter, Graeme Rocher, Guido van Rossum Guido van Rossum, and Doug Cutting examine the forces shaping IT in this special panel discussion recorded at Oracle Code One.
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