Software Design X-Rays

Distribution Won’t Cure the Dependency Blues

In this chapter we discussed how behavioral code analysis helps us get tactical information on complex systems such as microservice architectures at scale. The same techniques are also useful as input to planning and as a way to reason about change, which is significantly harder in a microservice architecture. I first experienced that in the early 2000s as I worked on my first microservice system, so let me share a painful lesson.

Of course, back in the 2000s we didn’t know we were doing microservices as the term hadn’t yet been coined. Instead the architecture was the logical conclusion of applying the UNIX design philosophy on the scale of a distributed system. (See Linux and the Unix Philosophy, ...