Are You Infected by Microservice Envy?

“We’re concerned that people see this hype in the marketplace and they see [the Microservice] style of architecture as a panacea. So they might jump into it more quickly than they are actually ready to,” explains Scott Shaw, head of technology for Australia.

In the recent Technology Radar, Scott and his colleagues from the Technology Advisory Board have added Microservice Envy to the Hold Ring, because they are concerned people are overdoing it.

“Start small...start with one Microservice,” is his advice.

I recorded a short interview recently with Scott about Microservices and Microservice Envy.

In this interview, we talk about the prerequisites of being successful with a Microservice style architecture. First, you need to have an automatic deployment pipeline in place so you can deploy effectively and frequently to the cloud. You also need to have good DevOps practices and infrastructure automation around, so spinning up a dedicated server is not something that takes month.

Scott explains, that for being able to do Microservices, you need to have a clear understanding of the domain, which will give your Microservices their bounded context rooted in your domain. His advice for green field application, especially when you don’t have the practices in place, is to start with a monolith (or one lonely Microservices) and then split it up, when it makes sense.

“Services need to evolve”, he says.

More episodes of the Podcast can be found at SoundCloud, iTunes or via RSS.