Microservices: Up and Running

Chapter 8. Developer Workspace

In Chapter 1 we discussed how a microservices architecture is typically most beneficial when it is applied to complex systems, and explained some of the underlying reasons supporting this observation.

In any reasonably complex system, the only sustainable way to ensure that well-intentioned participants behave in a way that leads to positive and predictable collaboration is to make the right behaviors the absolute easiest and most intuitive ones. If doing the “right thing” is hard, over time most people will choose the path of least resistance—which will steer them the wrong way. It is therefore essential to invest early in setting up repeatable, predictable, standardized development processes that avoid unnecessary complexity and create an intuitively comfortable structure for your developers.

Tip

Investing in an exceptional developer experience that aims at a consistent and intuitive approach for all developers to easily “do the right thing” is one of the most underappreciated prerequisites of facilitating a successful microservices culture.

This is why developing robust continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, for both your code as well as infrastructure, is a key enabler for your microservices efforts. Because of the modular nature of the architecture and the emphasis on independent deployability of each microservice, you will end up with many pipelines. One thing you should certainly avoid is every team creating a ...