• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Dion Almaer

Software, Development, Products

  • @dalmaer
  • LinkedIn
  • Medium
  • RSS
  • Show Search
Hide Search

We need more biologists to deal with the world of microservices

November 2, 2015 Leave a Comment


When building software products you are at times doing work akin to chemistry, and at others more like biology.

What do I mean by that? Take unit testing vs. integration testing as an example. Unit testing is very much like chemistry in that you are isolating the environment so you can do analysis and measurements on the output of certain reactions and experiments. This helps you isolate your understanding, and in software it allows you to regress the changes to your experiments (since you are changing the reaction every time you change some code).

In the real world your code isn’t that isolated and this is where integration testing comes in. It is akin to biology in that you are testing the entire system and it gives you a global view on that scope. It allows you to run multiple systems to test against and perform tweaks on (e.g. change settings that the system runs with and see how performance is impacted). The beauty of software is that you can run a huge number of concurrent systems, randomize variables, and pull together the results to see what wins. Brute Force Baybee. Would you feel totally at ease with that approach though? Or, would you like to understand why?

To do real science you need both views. Unfortunately though, I feel like the computer scientists focus on chemistry and math when we need a much larger focus on the biology and practical engineering disciplines.

We too often merge together anyone who writes code as software engineers or software developers, but in reality there are sub-disciplines and a spectrum between app developers and engineers. We often run into problems when we have the wrong people in the wrong roles, but the current misstep du jour seems to be in the world of microservices.

I have seen epic failures in microservice deployments, and the root cause is generally because everyone is focused on the individual services (the chemistry) and not giving adequate attention to the overall system (the biology). It is easy to see how this happens, and I talked about some of the reasons in a recent video interview:

Other segments discussed the role of containers, and the importance of putting the client first

With monolithic applications teams could easily be stepping on each others toes and causing a lot of pain. But now with microservices each team can work in its own space and not have to worry about what the other teams are doing. Loose dependencies are good dependencies!

The key issue though is that no silver bullet can get you away from doing the hard work. Software is hard. You need to rigorously be taking problems and breaking them down mercilessly until you are left with the smallest, understandable pieces in your bare hands. To do this at scale you are looking to do so with a team larger than one, so you need to start to communicate. Now you need to understand each other and come up with contracts that each side can agree on. Getting these specified correctly and concretely is tough, but that isn’t the end. You need to define SLAs, and how you will work together. Good partners will be inclusive. They won’t be in CYA mode, but will instead realize that you are in this together. You will run each others tests against your systems to make sure that you aren’t breaking your customers.

Work will be done on the system that houses and allows for the communication between these systems. How are services versioned, rolled out and accepted? How is everything correlated in the system? How do we handle back pressure? There are many questions that a team needs to have answers for.

When it goes wrong, microservices feel like a step backwards. Everyone is pushing new code and breaking each other. The system is unpredictable and down all of the time and everyone points at each other. People may start to think that they have been sold a new one and should go back to their Old Faithful POS monolith. They are probably wrong. The problem wasn’t the shiny bullet, it was how everyone went about using it. It can be turned around if work is put into the infrastructure, process, and incentives.

I can tell if something isn’t going to end well when I see individual teams going out for a beer after they finished a sprint rather than the entire team going out to celebrate users having success with the product in production.

One of the worst examples of this created API granularity based on team size rather than the natural composition and abstraction of the domain. This lead to far too many end points and dependencies between them all.

So maybe it isn’t just that we need to account for the biology of the systems (although we need to), perhaps we also need to focus more on the team biology.

How much time is spent on the biology of your systems?

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook

Tagged With: Cloud Computing, Microservices

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Twitter

My Tweets

Recent Posts

  • Generative AI: It’s Time to Get Into First Gear
  • Developer Docs + GenAI = ❤️
  • We keep confusing efficacy for effectiveness
  • The holy grail of a Web SDK
  • The rise of the extensible app platforms

Follow

  • LinkedIn
  • Medium
  • RSS
  • Twitter

Tags

3d Touch 2016 Active Recall Adaptive Design Agile Amazon Echo Android Android Development Apple Application Apps Artificial Intelligence Autocorrect blog Bots Brain Calendar Career Advice Cloud Computing Coding Cognitive Bias Commerce Communication Companies Conference Consciousness Cooking Cricket Cross Platform Deadline Delivery Design Desktop Developer Advocacy Developer Experience Developer Platform Developer Productivity Developer Relations Developers Developer Tools Development Distributed Teams Documentation DX Ecosystem Education Energy Engineering Engineering Mangement Entrepreneurship Exercise Family Fitness Founders Future GenAI Gender Equality Google Google Developer Google IO Habits Health HR JavaScript Jobs Jquery Kids Stories Kotlin Language Leadership Learning Lottery Machine Learning Management Messaging Metrics Micro Learning Microservices Microsoft Mobile Mobile App Development Mobile Apps Mobile Web Moving On NPM Open Source Organization Organization Design Pair Programming Paren Parenting Path Performance Platform Platform Thinking Politics Product Design Product Development Productivity Product Management Product Metrics Programming Progress Progressive Enhancement Progressive Web App Project Management Psychology Push Notifications pwa QA Rails React Reactive Remix Remote Working Resilience Ruby on Rails Screentime Self Improvement Service Worker Sharing Economy Shipping Shopify Short Story Silicon Valley Slack Software Software Development Spaced Repetition Speaking Startup Steve Jobs Study Teaching Team Building Tech Tech Ecosystems Technical Writing Technology Tools Transportation TV Series Twitter Typescript Uber UI Unknown User Experience User Testing UX vitals Voice Walmart Web Web Components Web Development Web Extensions Web Frameworks Web Performance Web Platform WWDC Yarn

Subscribe via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Archives

  • January 2023
  • September 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • November 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • October 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • January 2019
  • October 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • May 2018
  • February 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012

Search

Subscribe

RSS feed RSS - Posts

The right thing to do, is the right thing to do.

The right thing to do, is the right thing to do.

Dion Almaer

Copyright © 2023 · Log in