In this podcast, Michael Stiefel spoke with Justin Sheehy about how to safely put software into production without creating production incidents. Among the topics discussed were the futility of root cause analysis, and the importance of having a shared language for discussing incidents. This discussion included the need for software to be malleable as well as observable, and noted the fact that there are no pure technology decisions, every one of them is a business decision. They also discussed how the growth and use of artificial intelligence poses a major problem for the ability of engineers to understand and fix production incidents.

Read a transcript of this interview: http://bit.ly/4o7iJsW

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Transcript

Safely Changing Software to Avoid Incidents: A Conversation with Justin Sheehy

Jonas Bonér, CTO of LightBend and creator Akka, discusses using Akka when developing distributed systems. He talks about the Actor Model, and how every Microservice needs to be viewed as a system to be successful. 

Why listen to this podcast:

 - Akka is JVM-based framework design for developing distributed systems leveraging the Actor Model - an approach for writing concurrent systems that treat actors as universal primitives and the most successful model with abstraction has been streaming
 - Circuit breakers in Akka are a backup and retry policy; they protect you by capturing failure data and allow you to roll back 
 - Every Microservice needs to be viewed as a system, it needs to have multiple parts that run on different machines in order to function and be fully resilient - thus is a Microsystem
 - Two different trends have emerged when it comes to hardware and environments: one is the trend toward Multi-core, the is a movement toward virtualized environments and the cloud
 - Saga pattern of managing long running transactions in a distributed system fits very well with messaging style architectures

Notes and links can be found on: http://bit.ly/2kwB2eB

Akka
The Actor Model
When Akka and the Actor Model is the perfect choice
Circuit breakers patterns in distributed systems
Two trends toward Multi-core
Reactive Manifesto
Event Driven vs. Message Driven
Reactive Programming and Streams
Microliths to Microsystems
What do you have to get right before you start trying to deploy a distributed systems?
Working with ML / AI at Lightbend to understand tracing through distributed system
Saga Pattern

More on this:
Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2kwB2eB

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InfoQ Podcast

Show Notes

Jonas Bonér on the Actor Model, Akka, Reactive Programming, Microservices and Distributed Systems

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Safely Changing Software to Avoid Incidents: A Conversation with Justin Sheehy

InfoQ

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