No next Next: Fighting Entropy in your Microservices Architecture

Anna Shipman

Tech Director of Customer Products, Financial Times

@annashipman
No next Next

Fighting Entropy in your
Microservices Architecture

It didn’t take long for
entropy

to set in
@annashipman

Entropy is
inevitable
@annashipman

It’s possible to fight entropy

and I’m going to tell you how
@annashipman

@annashipman
Anna Shipman

Technical director for Customer

Products
(FT.com

&

the

apps)

1. Start working towards order

@annashipman


2. Actively remove haunted forests

@annashipman


2. Actively remove haunted forests

3. Accept entropy and handle it
@annashipman

I will tell you how we did
those things
@annashipman

“Falcon” was a monolith
@annashipman

It had to be deployed

out of hours, monthly
@annashipman

There was no way to move

to continuous deployment
@annashipman

Di
ff
erent parts of the site
were owned by di
ff
erent parts
of the business
@annashipman

For two years, a small team
worked on a prototype
called

“Next”
@annashipman

Next has a
microservices

architecture
@annashipman

There is a focus

on speed,

shipping and

measurement
@annashipman

Now it ships hundreds
of

times a week
@annashipman

The site is much faster,

responsive, A/B testing
built

in
@annashipman

And it is owned by one team:

Customer Products
@annashipman

I joined the FT in April 2018

@annashipman

The FT has a great culture
@annashipman

@annashipman
Photo credit: Helen Hayward

We are a diverse team with
a

lot of autonomy
@annashipman

Everyone is smart, and
motivated by our purpose
@annashipman

All was not
well with
the

tech
@annashipman

I met all the engineers 1:1
and

some common
themes

emerged
@annashipman

The technical direction
wasn’t

clear
@annashipman

There were haunted forests

@annashipman

Feature changes felt bitty

@annashipman

@annashipman
“It doesn’t feel like
we

are owning or
guiding a system,
just

jamming bits in”

80% of our 300+ repos did
not

have an assigned
technical owner
@annashipman

5 people on the
out

of

hours

rota
@annashipman

The system felt
overly

complex
@annashipman

I recognised some of these

themes from GOV.UK
@annashipman

One way to solve this is throw
it in the bin and start again

@annashipman

Next cost £10mn and

took 2 years to build

@annashipman

And we’d be here
again

in

x

years
@annashipman

@annashipman
Entropy means disorder

Over time your system will
become messy, more complex
& eventually unmanageable
@annashipman

You can
fight

entropy
@annashipman

Stop “just jamming bits in”
@annashipman

You need to do this more

consciously with
microservices than
with

a

monolith
@annashipman

Clarify and communicate
what order looks like
@annashipman

Clarify your tech strategy

@annashipman

Make your intentions clear
@annashipman

Communicate your strategy
@annashipman

Communicate your strategy
until you are sick of the sound
of your own voice*

*(and carry on communicating)
@annashipman

Make it easy for people to
move towards order
@annashipman

We moved to durable teams
@annashipman

We moved to full

technical ownership
@annashipman

Durable teams are great but
don’t solve

all

the problems
@annashipman

It’s good to have guardrails
@annashipman

Clarify what order looks like,
communicate it, make it easy
@annashipman

Things will get gnarled up
@annashipman

It’s not technical debt, but
the outcome is the same

@annashipman

Leave things better than

you found them

@annashipman

Sometimes you have to plan

a larger piece of work

@annashipman

You have to properly
schedule

this work

@annashipman

It’s not one and done
@annashipman

You need to learn how

to sell the work
@annashipman

Entropy is inevitable so you
have to schedule in larger
simplification projects
@annashipman

You have accepted some

level of complexity by
using

microservices
@annashipman

@annashipman
If your system is complex,
entropy will make things
very messy

Empower people to make
the

right decisions

@annashipman

Devolve decision making
as

far as you can

@annashipman

Involve people in building

the tech strategy

@annashipman

@annashipman
Photo credit: @itsallgonewrong

We made some decisions only
within technical leadership

@annashipman

Documentation is key
@annashipman

How we solved the out o
@annashipman
Increasing out of hours rota
participation

We were down to 5
people

on

the rota
@annashipman

Sometimes you need a
variety

of techniques
@annashipman

We introduced a shadow rota
@annashipman

We quadrupled the number
of

people on the rota
@annashipman

From 5 to 22 people on the
rota (out of a team of ~60)
@annashipman

You have accepted a level
of

complexity: empower
people

to handle it
@annashipman

We fought entropy and won…
@annashipman

…it’s an ongoing project
@annashipman

You can fight it:
@annashipman

There will always be
complexity in microservices

@annashipman

There are things you can do

to reduce it and to handle it
@annashipman

You have to address these

things consciously
@annashipman

I’ve given you some

tools you can use
@annashipman

And if any of this interests
you, we are hiring!

aboutus.ft.com/careers
@annashipman

Useful links

medium.com/ft-product-technology/no-next-
next-42c71541ebcc

infoq.com/articles/communicating-engineering-
work-business/

@annashipman

Thanks!

@annashipman

No next Next: Fighting Entropy in your Microservices Architecture

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No next Next: Fighting Entropy in your Microservices Architecture