Microservices: An Architectural and Cultural Evolution

At a recent Microservices Meetup in NY, Michael Bryzek and Adrian Cockcroft discussed their extensive experience with microservices.

Dealing with a traffic spike amounting to half of Amazon’s traffic each day when new sales are announced is no easy matter. Michael Bryzek, co-founder and former CTO of retailer Gilt Groupe, talks about the architectural and cultural evolution that took place as Gilt introduced microservices during its growth over the course of the past seven years.

Successfully building a microservices architecture typically takes a strong culture of trust with teams that are empowered to do the right thing. Bryzek discusses some of the sources of inspiration they had when faced with the problem of developing trust while growing their engineering capability, and some of the other organizations whose lessons they looked to for ideas.

​Adrian Cockcroft is well known for his role as cloud systems architect during Netflix’s migration to the cloud-native platform capable of supporting its massive scale. In this talk, he introduces a tool he has been working on for large-scale microservice simulations and modeling, mixed with some descriptions of problems and topologies you might expect to see with a system like Netflix.

Cockcroft first provides us with a valuable definition of microservice: “a loosely coupled service oriented architecture with bounded contexts … to make sure you break your problem into the right chunks”. After describing some monitoring problems that must be addressed in cloud-based systems and lamenting the lack of tools that allow request flow to be modeled and tested in a cloud-based microservice architecture, he introduces his tool, spigo (soon to be renamed to simianviz).