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Review: Building Microservices

bulding microservicesBuilding Microservices
Sam Newman
ISBN: 978-1-491-95035-7

Scale out where you can, scale up where you must.

Someone, somewhere, should probably start a collection of “where you can, where must” sayings, as these rules of thumb (thumbs were used by carpenters instead of a ruler to measure an inch, apparently) are important to remember, even if they’re imprecise. Route where you can, switch where you must — really refers to using layer 3 versus layer 2 networking as much as possible — for instance. Scaling out, from the perspective of network engineering, is all about repeatable modules, spine and leaf fabrics, and distribution of the control plane (didn’t think of that last one, did you?).

But what does scaling out mean in the application development world? It means splitting services into modular pieces which interact over the network. The ultimate goal of splitting services is to get to the microservice.

But what is a microservice?

To answer this question, you need to turn to the first chapter of Scaling Microservices, which says, “Microservices are small, autonomous services that work together.” Sam Newman, in the rest of the first chapter, explains the concept well, from a number of different angles, Continue reading

Worth Reading: SD-WAN and Per Application Routing

SD-WAN Gives Us The Best Path We Always Wanted

Of course, routing on a per application (or a per packet) basis provides more optimization, but it also adds more state in the control plane, and it increases the speed at which that state changes. In my forthcoming book on network complexity, I’m going to work around a model of state/speed/surface, with a side of optimization, to gain an understanding of network complexity and how to manage it.

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Explain-a-holic (Communicate Clearly)

But just a couple of days ago, I was talking to someone about managing expectations in the IT world. How do you convince someone else to buy into a project? How do you get them to back your idea, rather than inventing their own? While the question itself is interesting, I’m going to leave my thoughts on it to another post.

What I realized, halfway through answering the question, was that I was sucking up a lot of time talking about things that probably didn’t matter. I was spending time talking about the problems of getting people to own the problem, or make them believe they’d invented the solution, and specific projects I’d been involved in where we could never convince a wide group of people to buy into our ideas and solutions.

At some point, I’m certain I sounded like this snippet from a recent email —

Like if I asked, “what is 1+1?” he might say, “one takes 1, and adds 1 to it, and you get the next integer, which is really quite interesting, because you can do this over and over again, and never get the same answer, which is a bit like…”

There are, Continue reading

Worth Reading 06:12

According to the Data Center Journal:

What’s the problem with IT resumes? They’re useless.

The real problem with IT resumes, though, is we want to see a long list of technologies, because we want to find the specific technology we want to implement (or are implementing) — rather than a good engineer. The hiring process is a fishing expedition rather than a search for solid talent and personality fit. If we want to fix this problem we can. The question is — do we want to?

Bruce Schneier has some wise thoughts on airport security this week —

We don’t need perfect airport security. We just need security that’s good enough to dissuade someone from building a plot around evading it. If you’re caught with a gun or a bomb, the TSA will detain you and call the FBI. Under those circumstances, even a medium chance of getting caught is enough to dissuade a sane terrorist

Replace “airport” with “network,” and you get the drift of where network security is going, I think. Of course, there’s the reality that you can’t stop insane attackers… Worth remembering. The same point can be made for network uptime, by the way. Perfection is Continue reading

An Example of Obsfucation

With reference to the Verification exercise embarked upon as a result of the Payment Claim Application received from you on the settlement of the subsidiary contract payment on the Over Due Contract Resettlement, I wish to inform you that a Provisional Approval have been given to recognize your claim and consequently commence the final process of the payment regularization, validation and release to you. By Standard Chartered Bank.

When you read a sentence and think, “I don’t know what that says,” it generally means nothing was actually said. IE — it’s spam.

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Rethinking Centralization

In general, my line of thinking here is this: some things work well when they’re distributed, others work well when they’re centralized. Our bodies have a “central nervous system,” which is tied to a single point of failure (the brain), though our brains turn out to have some redundancy. On the other hand, other systems in our bodies are distributed, such as our reaction to being cut (and bleeding to death). What we need to start doing is thinking through what works well where, and figuring out how to move each one to that specific destination.

Another parallel in this space is what we’re facing now in application development. We like to say that we’re moving towards the cloud — which means thin clients and thick servers. The reality is, though, services are being broken down into microservices and distributed, and a lot of the processing that takes place does so on the client side by code pushed there from the server. In other words, our belief that the cloud “centralizes everything” is an oversimplification.

Taking one step back, we can always build centralized systems that scale to today’s requirements — the challenge is that we don’t know what tomorrow’s Continue reading

Architect or Designer?

Are you an architect or designer? What’s the difference? A reader asked this last week in email — my (probably) less than perfect response.

First, we have to dispense with this objection — network people aren’t “architects” in the first place. Nor are they “engineers.” Okay, so… A challenge: what else would you call someone who designs and builds things? When someone says, “You’re not a real architect, because you don’t build buildings, and you’re not held responsible for your work,” I tend to reply, “Why are you talking to me if I don’t exist?”

I’ve probably spent a lot more time than most people thinking about what the difference between design and architecture is, as it was a major issue when the CCDE and CCAr were split into two certifications (long ugly story — but then again, whenever marketing is involved, it normally is). With the help of some psychos (psychometricians, actually, but saying you worked with psychos for seven years to develop certification just sounds cooler somehow), we came up with some differentiators that I think are useful.

The difference is in focus, not task — the designer focuses on a solution to a narrower engineering problem, Continue reading

Bing Translator

I’ve rearranged the slideout sidebar a little; tightened up the text a little so more will fit (I might customize the styling a little to make it even tighter). I also added a bing translator widget; slide out the bar, press the translate button, and a small floating popup will appear. Click down to choose a language to translate to. I don’t know how good the translation is, but I thought this might be useful.

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Worth Reading 06:04

It’s been a bit of a crazy week — out to SFO, where I saw a lot of old friends, for NANOG. I picked up the top shirt on my pile this morning, and discovered it’s an old NANOG shirt, SFO in 2004 (!). The good news is the NANOG folks get their videos on line really fast — and all of them are worth watching. The channel is here, but I’d like to especially point out the talks on active monitoring, QUIC, and OpenConnect. Yes, my presentation is there, too.

One point to remember is that as the “network guy,” you stand between people and their funny cat videos. While people get mad about plumbing, they seem to get irate about their network access — because it’s all virtual it all seems so easy, I guess. It doesn’t help that the modern face of IT tends to be large companies that have a virtual monopoly and totally horrible customer service. But whatever the reason, it means you have to be extra careful not to step on people’s toes when you’re doing network engineering — the perception doesn’t have to be reality to impact your life.

A really good Continue reading

IT/IT: Resume Building

It’s a discussion in meeting rooms, boardrooms, hotel conference rooms, and post-conference cocktail parties: Why isn’t IT working? Ask anyone in a corporate or government job and you’ll get an earful. As I was writing this book, I’d occasionally throw the question out to friends, clients, and beleaguered airplane seatmates. The responses come fast and furious. They don’t speak our language. They’re too focused on resume building and tinkering, not on driving business value.
The New IT

This single quote describes much of the circuit of the world for an engineer. If I spend my time on driving business value, then I’m appreciated by my current employer — at least until they change systems, anyway, and throw me out on my ear because my skills aren’t “current.” If I spend my time keeping my skills current, so I can add business value, well, I’m not driving current business value, and hence I’m “isolated,” a “tinker in the corner,” who doesn’t understand nor care about the “real problems facing the business.”

What’s the solution? A little “bump in the training budget” isn’t going to fix this. Rather, this is going to take restructuring the way IT thinks about business, Continue reading

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