Software Architecture Superstream Series: Mastering Your Microservices Stack

Schedule

The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.

Neal Ford: Introduction (5 minutes) - 7:00am PT | 10:00am ET | 2:00pm UTC/GMT

• Neal Ford welcomes you to the Software Architecture Superstream.

Chris Richardson: From the Trenches (35 minutes) - 7:05am PT | 10:05am ET | 2:05pm UTC/GMT

• Join us for a special conversation with Neal Ford and Chris Richardson. They’ll discuss some of the challenges facing software architects and developers working with microservices and some of the best practices they’ve developed for optimizing work for distributed systems.
• Chris Richardson is a software architect and serial entrepreneur. He’s a Java Champion, a JavaOne rock star, and the author of POJOs in Action and Microservice Patterns; he was also the founder of the original CloudFoundry.com, an early Java PaaS for Amazon EC2. A recognized thought leader in microservices, he delivers consulting and training to help organizations successfully adopt and use the microservice architecture and is the founder of a startup that’s creating a platform that simplifies the development of transactional microservices.

Mike Amundsen: Service and API Migration at Speed (30 minutes) - 7:40am PT | 10:40am ET | 2:40pm UTC/GMT

• So you’re convinced that adding microservices to your IT organization’s offerings is a good idea. But how do you get there? What does it take to move from monolithic releases to microservices releases, and how can you do this in a way that doesn’t disrupt your current business? Join noted author, speaker, and software architect Mike Amundsen to explore the STAR (stabilize, transform, add, and repeat) method for safely and effectively migrating your existing IT infrastructure to a microservices platform—all without interrupting your current IT services.
• An internationally known author and speaker, Mike Amundsen consults with organizations around the world on network architecture, web development, and the intersection of technology and society. He helps companies large and small capitalize on the opportunities provided by APIs, microservices, and digital transformation. Mike has authored numerous books, chapters, and papers, including "Continuous API Management," RESTful Web Clients, and Microservice Architecture. His latest book is  Design and Build Great APIs (Pragmatic Publishing).
• Break (10 minutes)

Omotola Awofolu: Introducing the Saga Pattern in Microservices with Spring Statemachine (35 minutes) - 8:20am PT | 11:20am ET | 3:20pm UTC/GMT

• There are several well-known challenges with managing data in microservice architectures, including transaction management. How can database operations ensure validity despite executing across multiple isolated contexts? How can they still provide reliability and durability guarantees? How will issues like failures, partial executions, and race conditions be remediated? Tola Awofolu walks you through the saga pattern—an approach for handling database transactions that span multiple requests. Join in to see how to implement the pattern using an event-driven tech stack, with a specific focus on Spring Statemachine.
• Tola Awofolu is a senior solution engineer at VMware. She has over 18 years of experience in application architecture and full stack development; in that time she’s worn a number of hats in software engineering, working in both public and private sectors of tech and building enterprise systems using several different programming languages—Java being her personal favorite. She enjoys the poetic artistry of code, the keen depth of poetry, and the poetry of music (as an artist in her spare time). See more on her blog, Stuff About Cloud Native Development.
• Break (5 minutes)

Allen Holub: The Intersection of Agile and Microservices (30 minutes) - 9:00am PT | 12:00pm ET | 4:00pm UTC/GMT

• Allen Holub is a widely recognized software architect and Agile-transformation consultant. He speaks internationally about these topics, as well as about Agile-friendly implementation technology (like microservices) and architecture, and provides in-depth consulting and training in these areas. He's worn every hat from CTO to grunt programmer over his career and is an expert-level programmer in many languages and platforms. His works include 10 books, hundreds of articles in publications ranging from Dr. Dobb’s Journal to IBM Developer, and video classes for O’Reilly, agilitry.com, Pluralsight, and LinkedIn Learning (forthcoming).

Adam Bellemare: Event-Driven Microservices and the Data Communication Layer (30 min) - 9:30am PT | 12:30pm ET | 4:30pm UTC/GMT

• Growing organizations eventually find that a single monolithic service can no longer fulfil all their business needs. What next? By treating data as a well-formed, first-class citizen, you can enable event-streams as the main means of data communications. Adam shows you how this model works, how to populate it with key business data, the roles of the participants, and the many business options that this model unlocks.
• Adam Bellemare is the recent O'Reilly Author of Building Event-Driven Microservices. He is a seasoned big-data platform and application developer, who has been working with events and event-streaming since the early days of Kafka 0.8.1. Prior to that he worked on early edge systems, defining, collecting, and storing events in durable yet-shoddily-built custom event broker. He is passionate about bridging the gap often found between the "data world" and that of the "core application".
• Break (10 minutes)

Unmesh Joshi: Patterns of Distributed Systems (35 minutes) - 10:10am PT | 1:10pm ET | 5:10pm UTC/GMT

• Programming distributed systems poses a particular challenge. They often require multiple copies of data, which you need to keep synchronized. Yet you can’t count on processing nodes to work reliably, and network delays can easily lead to inconsistencies. Despite this, many organizations rely on a range of core distributed software handling data storage, messaging, system management, and compute capability. These systems face common problems—and solve them with similar solutions. Unmesh Joshi shows how to recognize and develop these solutions as patterns, then use them to better understand, communicate, and teach distributed system design.
• Unmesh Joshi is a principal consultant at ThoughtWorks. He’s a software architecture enthusiast who believes that understanding the principles of distributed systems is as essential today as understanding web architecture or object-oriented programming was in the last decade.

Neal Ford: Closing Remarks (15 minutes) - 10:45am PT | 1:45am ET | 5:45pm UTC/GMT

• Neal Ford closes out today’s event.

Upcoming Software Architecture Superstream events:

• Soft Skills Are the Hardest Part - July 14, 2021
• Software Architecture Fundamentals: Comparing Architectural Styles - September 15, 2021
• Architecture Outside of Applications - November 3, 2021