
Building Microservices Designing Fine-Grained Systems
Reviews

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.

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.

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.












