InfoQ Homepage Distributed Systems Content on InfoQ
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Data is the Hard Part Working with Microservices
One of the hardest problem when creating and developing microservices for an enterprise is their data. Analysing the business domain using Domain-Driven Design (DDD) and reason about what your data represents will help in achieving a microservices architecture, Christian Posta claims in one of a series of blog posts about microservices implementations.
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Five Ways to Not Mess Up Microservices in Production
Alex Zhitnitsky of Takipi has written about five ways to try to improve the chances of successful deployed of microservices into production. As we will see, they share many similarities with other independent efforts, perhaps leading us to agreement on top areas of concern, if not ways of solving these problems.
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GitHub’s DGit Improves Reliability, Performance, and Availability
GitHub has been quietly rolling out DGit, short for “distributed Git”, a new distributed storage system built on top of Git with the aim of improving reliability, availability, and performance of using GitHub.
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LFE Brings Lisp to the Erlang Virtual Machine
After 8 years of development, Lisp Flavoured Erlang (LFE) has reached version 1.0, bringing stable support for Lisp programming on the Erlang virtual machine (BEAM). LFE was created by Robert Virding, one of the initial developers of Erlang. InfoQ has spoken with Duncan McGreggor, current maintainer of LFE.
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Anti-Patterns Working with Microservices
The main problem with monolithic applications is that they are hard to scale, in terms of the application, but more importantly, in terms of the team. The main reason for a switch to microservices should be about teams, Tammer Saleh claimed at the recent QCon London conference when describing common microservices anti-patterns and solutions he has encountered.
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Microservices for a Streaming World
Embrace decentralization, build service-based systems and attack the problems that come with distributed state using stream processing tools, Ben Stopford urged in his presentation at the recent QCon London conference.
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Real-World Consistency Explained: Uwe Friedrichsen Discusses His Favourite Academic Papers
At the microXchg 2016 conference, held in Berlin, Germany, Uwe Friedrichsen presented a deep-dive into “real-world consistency explained”. Friedrichsen referenced multiple academic papers and discussed topics such as ACID vs BASE, his belief that many developers may not fully understand consistency guarantees with a typical SQL database, and how consistency affects microservice systems.
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Moving from Transactions to Streams to Gain Consistency
With many databases in a system they are rarely independent from each other, instead pieces of the same data are stored in many of them. Using transactions to keep everything in sync is a fragile solution. Working with a stream of changes in the order they are created is a much simpler and more resilient solution, Martin Kleppmann stated in his presentation at the recent QCon London conference.
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"Surviving Microservices" with Richard Rodger at microXchg: Messages, Pattern Matching and Failure
At the microXchg 2016 conference, held in Berlin, Germany, Richard Rodger presented “Surviving Microservices”, a practical guide for developers wanting to keep their microservices architectures ‘healthy and performant’. Key topics discussed in the talk included the benefits of message-oriented systems, pattern matching with inter-service communication, dealing with failure, and Seneca.js.
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Don’t Think like an Engineer When Designing Microservices
When designing microservices and their APIs, you need to think like a designer focusing on the users, Nic Benders claimed in his presentation at the recent Microservices Practitioner Summit. Design the API first, then build your services with an outside-in approach.
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Microservices and Teams at Amazon
The microservices pattern are changing how we build applications and team structure is extremely important to be successful in building and running these microservices, Chris Munns stated in a talk about how microservices at enterprise scale are built at Amazon at the earlier I Love APIs 2015 conference.
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IronFleet: A Methodology for Proving Distributed Systems
A group of researchers from Microsoft has published the paper “IronFleet: Proving Practical Distributed Systems Correct” (PDF) and made available the accompanying source code demonstrating the use of the methodology in machine proving the correctness of a non-trivial distributed system from a safety and liveliness point of view.
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Microservices Conference in Stockholm and London due Early November
The second Microservices Conference arranged by Skills Matter is due early November with two days in Stockholm and London respectively. The list of speakers include the program lead for the conference Russ Miles, David A. Dawson, Björn Carlson, chief architect at Klarna, Viktor Klang, chief software architect at Typesafe, Ian Cooper and Daniel Bryant.
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Lessons Learned Working with Distributed Systems
Preparing for problems like partial failure is the best thing you can do when working with distributed systems, Vaughn Vernon explains in a conversation with InfoQ and refers to a blog post by Jeff Hodges noting its down-to-earth approach and practical advices e.g. designing for partial availability, and using capped exponential back off to restore full operation when dependencies are unavailable.