Christopher Riley: Microservices vs The Distributed Monolith

When faced with a challenging legacy code base, tightly coupled and void of discernible structure: a big ball of mud, it is common to decide to refactor this monolith to a microservice architecture to separate concerns and split the codebase up, however without any clear boundaries you are in danger of creating a distributed big ball of mud. You may recognise the symptoms of a distributed ball of mud: a large unfocused 'common' library shared between multiple services; performance issues as your front end makes calls to multiple back end API's to serve a single request; dependency hell on deployments as you have to release multiple code bases simultaneously and uptime issues as a single microservice going down brings down your entire application. In this talk I'm going to cover some of the common pitfalls you might encounter when building a microservice architecture and show you how to use an event driven architecture to build truly scalable microservices.