Microservice Architecture, anligning principles, practices, and culture
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To stay on the right track with microservices, I wanted to revisit the philosophy and organizational recomendations on how to do them right. After reading Building Microservices in april this year, I got Microservice Architecture, aligning principles, practices, and culture by Irakli Nadareishvili et al.; O'Reilly Media, Inc., 2016.
The book can be read on one week-end as the content is very well condensed to 118 pages.
What did I get from the book?
The book provides a lot of information on the culture and organizational requirements to successfully implement a microservice architecture.
[C]ulture is perhaps the most intangible [domain] yet may also be the most important. We can broadly define culture as a set of values, briefs, or ideals that are shared by all of the workers.
It was very interesting to me to compare the presented observations with how we are doing microservices at work. One thing was especially interesting for me, as I did not read of this before, was the mention of the paper The Social Brain Hypothesis, 1998 in which Robin Dunbar writes about observations that there are several sizes of groups, that work better then others.
[T]he various human groups that can be identified in any society seem to cluster rather tightly around a series of values (5, 12, 35, 150, 500, and 2,000).
I can definetly recommend this book to everyone that already does microservices, or that plans to implement them. It does not present nor recommend any specific software product, but talks about the social and organizational requirements to succeed with this type of architecture. And it notes that they are not always the right way to go. In the book there is also a detailed list of further sources to deepen on various aspects of the topic.