Lessons I've learnt going from Monolith to Microservice over 4 years. 20 year old code base (dated back to 90s) and 50+ developers, 8 teams. What did I learn?

1. WHAT DID I LEARN?
4 YEARS OF
AWS MICROSERVICES

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INTRODUCTION

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WHO IS THIS TALK FOR?

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AIM FOR THIS TALK

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LESSONS HAVE BEEN GENERALISED

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MY VIEW:
WORKING WITH 8 DEVELOPMENT TEAMS

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QUESTIONS AT THE END

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20 years of Software Development
Helping SaaS companies leverage technology,
to innovate, scale and be market leaders.
Innovate and Scale SaaS
CloudFormation and RDS Courses
A Cloud Guru Instructor
DynamoDB and DynamoDB Playbook Courses
Pluralsight Author
www.abhayachauhan.com
@AbhayaChauhan
About me
Abhaya Chauhan

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The Story we will go through today
4 years in the making…
Lesson 1
Kicking off the journey
Lesson 3
A couple of Microservices
In Production (2 years)
Lesson 5
4 years later… reflection
Lesson 4
3 years
Multiple teams
A dozen Microservices
Lesson 2
First Microservice hits
Production
@AbhayaChauhan

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LESSON 1:
KICKING OFF

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GETTING STARTED:
INVESTMENT

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Monolith vs Microservice

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1 Technology Stack
Data Store
Project and Code Structures
CI & CD
Messaging & API Calls
2
3
4
5
Technical Decisions
For each Microservice…

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INVEST AS YOU GO

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INVEST UPFRONT

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COMMUNICATE THE APPROACH
AND EXPECTED IMPACT

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LESSON 1
Find your approach…
INVEST
UPFRONT
INVEST AS
YOU GO
Build foundational
capabilities before first
Microservice
Build foundational
capabilities
as you need

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LESSON 2:
CULTURE AND TALENT

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CULTURE SHIFTS

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CONTINUOUS DEPLOYMENT

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AUTOMATION

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End to end ownership
You build it, you run it
Develop it
Disaster Recovery
Support it
Server maintenance
(Patching, Upgrades,
Reindexing,
Downtime)
Security
Telemetry (Usage,
errors, scaling,
SLAs)

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Team
Junior DeveloperTech Lead Senior Developer Intermediate Developer

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DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS

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LESSON 2:
UNDERSTAND THE
CULTURE AND TALENT
SHIFTS REQUIRED

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LESSON 3:
YOU CAN ONLY GO SO FAST

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WHY BUILD MICROSERVICES?

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THE MONOLITH IS
SLOWING YOU DOWN

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HARD TO AVOID
INTEGRATING WITH MONOLITH

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INTEGRATE EARLY
INTEGRATE OFTEN

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Slice of Monolith
Continuously
Delivered

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CAN YOU GO STANDALONE?

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Lesson 3: Tethered to the Monolith

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LESSON 4:
TEAMS AND CAPABILITIES

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WHAT IS A CAPABILITY?
API enabled, reusable building block

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Capabilities
Foundational
Capabilities
Platform Capabilities
Domain Capabilities3
2
1
Data Storage (Multi-Tenancy, Backups)
CI / CD
Microservice Template
Authentication, Security, Forms,
Workflows, Message Bus
Business Domains

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S e r v e r l e s s M i c r o s e r v i c e Te m p l a t e
h t t p s : / / b i t . l y / 2 Q t t r K a
A P I F u z z y S e r i a l i z e r
h t t p s : / / b i t . l y / 2 x f G x 4 Z
OPEN SOURCED EXAMPLES
1
2

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AUTONOMOUS TEAMS
IS NOT WHAT YOU WANT

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YOU WANT
VALUE DELIVERY
WITHOUT BOTTLENECKS

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AUTONOMOUS TEAMS
REQUIRE STRONG ALIGNMENT

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A STORY…
THE EVENT BUS

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Lesson 4: Share Capabilities
Teams should be aligned to capabilities

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LESSON 5:
RESPECT THE ARCHITECTURE

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CAPABILITIES
WILL DEFINE YOUR SUCCESS

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AVOID THE
SCATTERGUN APPROACH

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Scattergun Approach
Feature X Feature Y Feature Z
Maturity/
Investment
Return on Investment

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Capability Roadmap
Map your Capabilities to your Product Roadmap
Search
Workflows
Authentication
Message Bus
40%
77%
61%
71%
Weight your Capabilities to your 12
– 24 month Product Roadmap

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Align teams to Capabilities
Plan for the ROI
12 – 24 month roadmap
SUCCESS
01. Authentication and Permissions
02. Workflows
03. Search
04. Message Bus

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SERVICE BOUNDARIES
IS THE HARDEST PART

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VOLATILITY BASED
DECOMPOSITION

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REMEMBER YOUR GOAL

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SUMMARY
Lessons we’ve discussed…
How & When to invest
Culture and Talent Shifts
Minimise Integration to the
Monolith
Align Teams and Capabilities
Respect the Architecture

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QUESTIONS

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THANK YOU