Surviving in a microservices environment

Many presentations on microservices offer a high-level view of the architecture; rarely do you hear what it’s like to work in such an environment. Individual services are somewhat trivial to develop, but now you suddenly have countless others to track. You’ll become obsessed over how they communicate. You’ll have to start referring to the whole thing as “the Platform.” You’ll have to take on some considerable DevOps work and start learning about deployment pipelines, metrics, and logging.

Don’t panic.

Stephen Pember (Toast) shares what he’s learned over the past six years migrating from a monolith to microservices across several companies. He examines what a development lifecycle might look like for adding a new service, developing a feature, or fixing bugs. You’ll see how team communication is more important than one might realize, as coordinating on architecture designs and implementation is crucial. Most importantly, he’ll show how—while an individual service is simple—the infrastructure demands are now much more more complicated: your organization will need to introduce and become increasingly dependent on various technologies, procedures, and tools ranging from the ELK stack to Grafana to Kubernetes. You’ll leave understanding why your resident SREs should be the most valued members of your team.