Sam Newman

Over the past 10 years, distributed systems have become more fine-grained. From the large multi-million line long monolithic applications, we are now seeing the benefits of smaller self-contained services. Rather than heavy-weight, hard to change Service Oriented Architectures, we are now seeing systems consisting of collaborating microservices. Easier to change, deploy, and if required retire, organizations which are in the right position to take advantage of them are yielding significant benefits.This book takes an holistic view of the things you need to be cognizant of in order to pull this off. It covers just enough understanding of technology, architecture, operations and organization to show you how to move towards finer-grained systems.

Building Microservices

Distributed systems have become more fine-grained in the past 10 years, shifting from code-heavy monolithic applications to smaller, self-contained microservices. But developing these systems brings its own set of headaches. With lots of examples and practical advice, the second edition of this practical book takes a holistic view of the topics that system architects and administrators must consider when building, managing, and evolving microservice architectures. Microservice technologies are moving quickly, and this revised edition gets you up to date with a new chapter on serverless and cloud-native applications, expanded coverage of user interfaces, more hands-on code examples, and other additions throughout the book. Author Sam Newman provides you with a firm grounding in the concepts while diving into current solutions for modeling, integrating, testing, deploying, and monitoring your own autonomous services. You'll follow a fictional company throughout the book to learn how building a microservice architecture affects a single domain.

Designing Fine-Grained Systems

Thomas Wang

A good high level overview of the popular microservices world; to deep dive each topic you would want to read the books it recommended in each topic.

Jk Jensen

The guidance contained in Building Microservices is valid but the execution feels sloppy and rushed. 

There are more than the forgivable number of grammar, punctuation, and even spelling errors in this book. Anecdotes are not well-adapted for the chapter topics. Diagrams are not consistent and are rarely meaningful.

As an example of the overall feel of this book, at the end Newman attempts to distill his offering into a set of key principles. However, the distillation is lost in the fact that said principles aren't even all, well, principles. "Decentralize all the things" makes some sense in this context, but "Culture of Automation" is a trait of successful microservice engineers, not a principle. Another one, "Highly observable," is an attribute of well-designed systems, not a principle at all. The scattered nature of this example makes it difficult to glean what are some of the most practical lessons in architecting and operating distributed systems that Newman assuredly has learned himself.

Maybe the editor should be blamed, but I can't help but feel that Newman's valuable insight is overshadowed here by a disappointing lack of finesse.

Nat Welch

I've finally given up on this book, it's so dry. It's all theory and not a lot of practical applications. That being said, it covers the basics of microservices well, just didn't hold my focus.

Building Microservices

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