Video and slides synchronized, mp3 and slide download available at URL http://bit.ly/2dTAQ5N. John Billings talks about winning over those skeptical about the benefits of microservices along with tips on caching, failure, interface changes, etc. for building a distributed system architecture. Filmed at qconnewyork.com. John Billings is Technical Lead for Infrastructure at Yelp, where he's been working for the past five years. He loves building scalable backend systems.

1. The Human Side of Microservices
John Billings
@jnb42
billings@yelp.com

2. InfoQ.com: News & Community Site
• 750,000 unique visitors/month
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Portuguese)
• Post content from our QCon conferences
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Watch the video with slide
synchronization on InfoQ.com!
https://www.infoq.com/presentations/
microservices-apologetics

3. Presented at QCon New York
www.qconnewyork.com
Purpose of QCon
- to empower software development by facilitating the spread of
knowledge and innovation
Strategy
- practitioner-driven conference designed for YOU: influencers of
change and innovation in your teams
- speakers and topics driving the evolution and innovation
- connecting and catalyzing the influencers and innovators
Highlights
- attended by more than 12,000 delegates since 2007
- held in 9 cities worldwide

4. Introduction

5. About me
• PhD in compiling and verifying routing
protocols
• Joined Yelp in February 2011
• Initially:
• Joined <10 person search team
• 70 - 80 engineers
• Now 300+ engineers

6. Yelp’s Mission
Connecting people with great
local businesses.

7. Yelp Stats
As of Q1 2016
90M 3270%102M

9. 3 million
1 million
LoC in monolith
2005 20162011

10. Number of microservices
117
2012 2016

11. LoC in microservices
891k
2012 2016

12. Microservice adoption

13. https://www.flickr.com/photos/24736216@N07/4433492189

14. http://www.soc.iastate.edu/extension/pub/comm/SP18.pdf
“The Diffusion Process”
George M. Beal and Joe M. Bohlen, 1957

17. Technology adoption curve
for a population

18. The chasm
Early adopters Early majority

19. Innovators

20. Innovators

22. The Geocoder Service

24. Early adopters

25. The majority

26. Education

27. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_distributed_computing

28. https://github.com/Yelp/service-
principles

29. ● Service type (PaaSTA vs legacy SOA)
● Technology type (Python / Java / daemon)
● Caching
● Downtime scenarios
● Databases
● External services
● Hardware requirements
● Load balancing
● Performance and uptime
● Monitoring
● Security

31. Summits and unconferences

32. Talks

33. Deputy programs

34. Office hours

35. Postmortems

36. Standards
Boo! Boring!
Tell me
something
interesting!
Zzzz………….!

37. Interfaces

38. Perform a real query

39. Tracing

40. Metrics

41. Datastores

42. Timeouts and retries
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abort,_Retry,_Fail%3F#/media/File:Abort_Retry_Fail.PNG

43. Ownership

46. Organizational
objectives

47. Lots of (potentially) conflicting objectives:
• Performance
• Reliability
• Cost
• Security
• Iteration speed

48. “What gets measured gets improved”
Peter Drucker

49. Conclusions

50. Microservices have forced us to build a more
robust, decentralized organization

51. This change has taken a long time

52. I believe (but cannot prove) that we are shipping
code as quickly as ever

53. Any questions?

54. Watch the video with slide
synchronization on InfoQ.com!
https://www.infoq.com/presentations/
microservices-apologetics