Microservices

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 day. For us over the time, our delivery pipeline has also evolved: During the Enterprise days, the release cycle was 6 weeks long. If you missed anything - wait for another 6 weeks. We used home grown scripts to coordinate all the deployments and overall experience was just awful. During the early days of Cloud, we moved to a daily deployments but these were at the end of the day with significant downtime and required lots of coordination with different teams. Today we have deployments on demand. Teams are deploying multiple time in a day with zero downtime! We love Slack at...

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 for everyone. There is recognition for great work and people are willing to learn from each other. Its a culture where everyone is empowered and feels responsible to participate/evolve/improve all aspects of the SDLC irrespective of their primary role. You can have specialized teams for the different parts but everyones feedback is welcomed. Processes are not followed like a religion but evolved throughout the lifecycle. Adoption of microservices is a steep learning curve for everyone. If an organization doesn’t have the right Engineering mindset, avoid doing microservices. You have ev...