From Monolith to Microservices and back again. Twice.

10:40, Room 1

Paddy Carey

The benefits of a microservice architecture to a growing organisation have been discussed by many, many people at conferences, in books, and on video. As an industry, we’re good at waxing lyrical about the gains in agility, productivity and reliability that such an architecture can provide. The problem is that very few organisations get this right, certainly not the first time, and certainly not without some serious pain along the way.

At ShopKeep we’ve been down this road. We’ve tried, and failed, to break our monolith apart and move towards the wonderful world of microservice nirvana. This talk is an adventure in failure and eventual recovery. I explore the transitions we made, the reasons why, the bad decisions, and the silly mistakes we made along the way. It’s not hopeless, there is light at the end of the tunnel, and hope for a glorious microservicey future for all of us.

Sharing our experiences of failure helps us all to build better, more reliable systems.