Chapter 3. Identifying the Pain Points of Service Integrations
Imagine that you run an educational journal for programmers that has paying customers but is too small to support full-time work.
Together with your friend Huan, you maintain a custom web application that supports the journal and its subscribers. Built on a tight budget, the project mostly consists of glue code around common open source tools combined with a handful of web service integrations.
Over the years, you’ve started to learn that there are considerable costs and risks involved in using code that isn’t under your own control. You’ve been bitten several times by action at a distance that wasn’t accounted for when designing your software, and consequently you’re now more cautious when integrating with external services.
As part of an annual retrospective, you will meet with Huan today to look back on a few of the biggest pain points you’ve had with third-party software integrations.
You’ve made a promise to each other not to turn this discussion into a game of “Who is to blame?”, a perspective that can easily generate more heat than light. Instead, you will focus on guarding against similar problems in future work, and if possible, preventing them from occurring in the first place.
In this chapter…
You will learn some of the various ways that third-party systems can cause failures, as well as how flawed thinking about service integrations can lead to bad decision making.
Plan for trouble when your needs are ...
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