Book Review: Building Microservices

Due to my new job I wanted to learn about microservices, and this book had good reputation and recommendations, so I decided to read it. After finishing the read yesterday, I can only recommend it to anyone starting with this system design principles.

Review

Title: Building Microservices

Author: Sam Newman

I'm pretty new to microservices, but working in a startup means you usually have to ramp-up from not knowing something to being able to use it on a daily basis, and quickly. While I have an experienced colleague in the subject, I cannot be asking him always, so I grabbed this book based on some recommendations, and have been reading it on commute time. And spoiling the review, I definitely think it is worth it.

I come from a background of classic monolithic web-apps, a SOA platform and a mostly shared-codebase set of REST APIs and components, so for me it's a process of true discovery and mindset revolution to think in really small, bounded and clearly defined services. It is too easy to cross those limits and do more things in the same place, or by mistake create dependencies or couplings. One of the first services I built few months ago acts really as a distributed synchronous component, not honouring the microservices "autonomous" principle... So I have a lot to learn, but this book really has taught me how to do things better.

Always including real world scenarios and stories from the author, we're slowly introduced to the basic pillars of a microservices architecture, to the why, what and how to both build from scratch and separate existing systems into pieces, decorated with lots of advices and curiously not so many dogmas, but tips and "usual solutions" (but not mandatory) about approaches you can take. I like the fact that while many books speak about "universal truths", here instead the tone is more like "decide by yourself and take my advice as guidance".

Moving towards asynchronous processing and communications, how to handle code reuse, libraries and shared components, orchestration (or why is it good to avoid it), metrics, monitoring, cross-functional requirements, testing, deployment, security, scaling... There are so many concepts at first that, as the last chapter of the book is a "quick" summary, I think we should print it and leave at the office as our small "microservices builder manual".

I had been told about some of the concepts, thought about few ones (but as usually happens with design patterns, not exactly in the best way) but the book provides lots of proper naming and topics you then can read more specifically about (like caching for resilience, synthetic transactions, consumer-driven contracts...).

I could go on longer, but I'd summarize it as a must read book if you work with microservices. Highly recommended.