microservices

This episode is a panel discussion from the microservices track QCon Plus, held in May 2021. Track host Nicki Watt asks "What have we learned over the last decade of microservices." The panelists included Chris Richardson, James Lewis, and Katie Gamanji. The discussion started with looking at how the meaning of "microservices architecture" has evolved over the past ten years. There were some great insights about how successfully developing, deploying, and maintaining software depends as much or more on cultural and environmental factors, than simply adopting microservices and all the tools and technology that now exist.

Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/3rOTrD7

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Transcript

What Have We Learned Over the Last Decade of Microservices?

"Incremental change may be good theory, but in practice you have to have a big enough stick to hit everybody with to make everything move at once". So shares Adrian Cockcroft, who helped lead Netflix's migration from datacenter to the cloud -- and from monolithic to microservices architecture -- when their streaming business (the "stick"!) was exploding.

So how did they -- and how can other companies -- make such big, bet-the-company kind of moves, without getting mired in fanatical internal debates? Does organizational structure need to change, especially if moving from a more product-, than project-based, approach? What happens to security? And finally, what happens to the role of CIOs; what can/should they do?

Most interestingly: How will the entire industry be affected as companies not only adopt, but essentially offer, microservices or narrow cloud APIs? How do the trends of microservices, containers, devops, cloud, as-a-service/ on-demand, serverless -- all moves towards more and more ephemerality -- change the future of computing and even work? Cockcroft (who is now a technology fellow at Battery Ventures) joins this episode of the a16z Podcast, in conversation with Frank Chen and Martin Casado (and Sonal Chokshi) to discuss these shifts and more.

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The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation.
 
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a16z Podcast: All About Microservices

This is the first in a new series of podcasts from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences - the Engineering Culture Podcast. 

In this podcast, Wes Reisz, chair of the QCon conferences in San Francisco, London and New York talks to Phil Haack, an Engineering Director at GitHub focused on software pushed mostly to the desktop.   He’s shipping software like GitHub Desktop, GitHub Extensions for Visual Studio and the Atom text editor.  Haack joined GitHub in 2011 and is a prominent member of the .Net community.  At Microsoft Phil was core to shipping NewGit and ASP.NET, MVC.NET.

Why listen to this podcast:

 - There is often too much focus on the nitty-gritty details of software development practices but as you scale out to larger projects and teams the challenges are not technological- they are sociological.
 - Research shows that teams which are more diverse are more effective.
 - Engineers shifting to management should consider it a discipline like any other technical field; it’s not something that you should “just wing”.
 - Building an effective team requires trust and that allows candid discussions and healthy debates without disrupting the relationships.  One-on-ones can be an effective way to do that.
 - To be an effective coach for engineers, a manager needs to be seen as a strong technical leader.  Someone without technical credibility is generally not received well.

Notes and links can be found on InfoQ: https://bit.ly/2L7Irg3

5m 10s The big problems we have are sociological, and frequently companies and engineers don’t pay enough attention to these problems because they try to focus on the technical practices instead; but the root cause is how people interact with each other and how they are working together.

5m 40s The talk covers some personal lessons learned and the research that backs those personal lessons. There is validated research that shows certain things make for more effective teams.

More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2L7Irg3
You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq

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Check the landing page on InfoQ: https://bit.ly/2L7Irg3

Here is Phil Haack's talk on Social Coding for Effective Teams and Products recorded at QCon San Francisco 2016: https://bit.ly/2QPEU9D

Engineering Culture by InfoQ

Github’s Phil Haack on Moving from Engineering to Management

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Alex Qin following on from her QCon London talk “Shaving My Head Made Me A Better Programmer”.

Why listen to this podcast:

- Casual discrimination and unconscious bias is rife in society, and very prevalent in tech
 - The need to have many more people in the field who don’t fit the preconceived mould of a programmer
 - The complexity of the overall system means we need to tackle discrimination at many levels in many different aspects
 - One person can make a difference
 - Call things out when you see things that are wrong – speak up, show up and shield those who can’t shield themselves

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

You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq

Subscribe: www.youtube.com/infoq
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Want to see extented shownotes? Check the landing page on InfoQ: http://bit.ly/2ugjaZY

Show Notes

Alex Qin on Leveraging Technology to Create Positive Social Change

Software engineers, architects and team leads have found inspiration to build better, high performing teams by listening to the weekly InfoQ Podcast. We have achieved that by interviewing some of the top CTOs, engineers and technology directors from companies like Uber, Netflix and more. Over 500,000 downloads in the last 3 years.

Github’s Phil Haack on Moving from Engineering to Management

Engineering Culture by InfoQ

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