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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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

Subscribe: www.youtube.com/infoq
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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

Adrian Cockcroft has been a great supporter of my work around microservices, and I was really grateful he was able to find the time to catch up with me at Yow 2015 late last year.

Few people have done as much to help share the power of the cloud in recent years as Adrian, but he certainly has a career that predates the explosion of Amazon Web Services. In episode 22 of the Magpie Talkshow, he shares is journey so far in the IT industry, from physics to venture capital firm Battery Ventures, with stops at Sun, EBay and Netflix in-between.

We also find time to talk about the future of memory, security & compliance, bad puns and flying spaghetti monster simulators.

As always you can find more information about the episode over at the blog: http://samnewman.io/blog/2016/10/08/magpie-talkshow-episode-22-adrian-cockcroft/

Magpie Talkshow Episode 22 - Adrian Cockcroft (Spaghetti Monster Simulation Edition)

Here’s what we know about open source: Developers are the new buyers. Community matters. And there will never be another Red Hat (i.e., a successful “open core” business model … nor do we necessarily think there should be).

Yet open source is real, and it’s here to stay. So how then do companies build a viable business model on top of open source? And not only make money, but become a huge business, like the IBMs, Microsofts, Oracles, and SAPs of the world? The answer, argues James Watters, has more to do with good software strategy and smart enterprise sales/procurement tactics (including design and a service-like experience) than with open source per se — from riding a huge trend or architectural shift, to being less transactional and more an extension of your customer’s team.

Watters, who is the SVP of Product at Pivotal (part of VMWare and therefore also Dell-EMC), is a veteran of monetizing open source — from OpenSolaris (at Sun Microsystems) to Springsource (acquired by VMWare) to Pivotal Cloud Foundry — with plenty of failures, and successes, along the way. He shares those lessons learned in this episode of the a16z Podcast with Sonal Chokshi and general partner Martin Casado (who was co-founder and CTO of Nicira, later part of VMWare before joining Andreessen Horowitz). These lessons matter, especially as open source has become more of a requirement — and how large enterprises bet on big new trends.

a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software)

with Nicole Forsgren (@nicolefv), Jez Humble (@jezhumble) and Sonal Chokshi (@smc90)

From the old claim that "IT doesn't matter" and question of whether tech truly drives organizational performance, we've been consumed with figuring out how to measure -- and predict -- the output and outcomes, the performance and productivity of software. It's not useful to talk about what happens in one isolated team or successful company; we need to be able to make it happen at any company -- of any size, industry vertical, or architecture/tech stack. But can we break the false dichotomy of performance vs. speed; is it possible to have it all? 

This episode of the a16z Podcast boldly goes where no man has gone before -- trying to answer those elusive questions -- by drawing on one of the largest, large-scale studies of software and organizational performance out there, as presented in the new book, Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps -- Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim. Forsgren (co-founder and CEO at DevOps Research and Assessment - DORA; PhD in Management Information Systems; formerly at IBM) and Humble (co-founder and CTO at DORA; formerly at 18F; and co-author of The DevOps Handbook, Lean Enterprise, and Continuous Delivery) share the latest findings about what drives performance in companies of all kinds.

But what is DevOps, really? And beyond the definitions and history, where does DevOps fit into the broader history and landscape of other tech movements (such as lean manufacturing, agile development, lean startups, microservices)? Finally, what kinds of companies are truly receptive to change, beyond so-called organizational "maturity" scores? And for pete's sake, can we figure out how to measure software productivity already?? All this and more in this episode!

microservices

Mark McCann