Tremendously pleased to announce another confirmed speaker for µCon!

James Lewis has been speaking about Microservices for some time now and will be sharing his experiences building software with this architectural approach within ThoughtWorks.

µCon still has it's early-bird £200 price available at time of writing but the tickets are going fast so grab your tickets at this price as soon as poss!

More great speaker announcements will be coming soon so watch this space!

Simplicity Itself has partnered up with Skills Matter to offer a special, one-off 1 Day tutorial that is an "Introduction to Building Microservices" scheduled for the day before.

This tutorial will cover:

• Understand Microservices in term of their Principles, Benefits and Challenges
• Architecting and Designing for Microservice-based System Evolution with the Life Preserver tool
• Build, Deploy and Manage Effective Unix-style Microservice Pipelines
• Simplify Microservice Management using Immutable Service Deployments
• Design and Implement Reactive Microservices
• Apply effective health and monitoring for microservices
• Design and Implement Microservice Failover and Auto-Recovery Strategies

So if you're interested in any of the above, this tutorial is a great place to get started. The tutorial will be a highly practical, deep-dive style workshop so bring your IDEs and I hope you can make it!

I'm really pleased to announce another confirmed speaker for µCon!

Douglas Squirrel will share his experiences in explaining and demonstrating the benefits of microservices to non-technical stakeholders in the business. To really balance things out, he'll also be taking a look at exactly when and when not to apply microservices at all.

µCon still has it's early-bird £200 price available at time of writing but the tickets are going fast so grab your tickets at this price as soon as poss.

More great speaker announcements will be coming soon so watch this space!

There are going to be code samples to accompany the "Antifragile Software: Building Adaptable Software with Microservices" book, LOTS of code samples (especially accompanying Book 3!). To organise the code and make it freely available I've created a new one-stop Antifragile Software GitHub organisation that will house each of the repos of code associates with the book.

Right now, it's empty but it's worth a watch as code will be appearing there soon.

The aim is to license the code using the Apache Software Licence as the code is added so that everyone can use it with as little restrictions as possible. After all, this is learning material!

In addition, the hope is that others might extend the ideas into new implementations and repositories of their own, and perhaps ask for those repos to be formally associated with this GitHub org. As long as the licenses are open then I'd be very keen to hear in time from others who would like to contribute their own samples to this reference organisation.

I've just published a new version of "Antifragile Software: Building Adaptable Software with Microservices". This book is incredibly close to my heart as it is beginning to capture not only how I build software systems but also how I approach the thinking process of architecture and design; this book is going to go philosophical as well as practical and I'm proud of that! 

That said, the book has been through quite a journey but the mission for the book (and it's sub-books) is now clear and so a huge thanks is in order to those that are early-adopters! The book is really beginning now to take shape not least in response to my work with Skills Matter on the first Microservice conference, µCon, and the announcement of my public courses that accompany this book too.

As such expect to see a lot more activity on the book than there has been in recent months (I apologies for that!). The ideas are now in place, the table of contents and flow I believe is a final one and I'm off and running with the writing.

Hopefully going forward the only thing I'll need to apologise for is the fact that readers are being asked to update their copy of the book too frequently!

I'm very pleased to a announce that our second keynote of µCon will be the legendary Udi Dahan! 

Udi has been active for years in service-oriented and domain-driven design areas, and so his keynote will likely be informative, entertaining and well worth the £200 early-bird price still available on the conference page at time of publication.

The "Building Microservices with Antifragility" public course is now scheduled this year in London at Skills Matter. Dates currently available are:

• Monday 19th to Wednesday 21st May, 2014
• Wednesday 13th to Friday 15th August, 2014

The course covers:

Day 1 - Architecture & Design for Simplicity and Antifragility:

• Introducing Antifragile Software and Simplicity
• Defining Microservices in term of their Principles, Benefits and Challenges
• Understand and explore the forces (stressors) of change on software
• Applying Simplicity, with O.R.E.
• Architecting and Designing for Software System Evolution with the Life Preserver tool
• Organising for concerns and simple components
• How to collaborate to discover change stressors on your software system
• Organising components for change

Day 2 - Implementing Antifragile Software with Simple Components, Events & Microservices:

• Exploring and Managing change-stressor fault-lines between areas of your system
• Designing software bridges that handle change across fault-lines
• Applying de-coupling intelligently, balancing flexility and complexity
• Applying Request-Response, Messaging and Events
• Designing when to apply and implement Postel’s Law

Day 3 - Deploying, Running, Testing & Managing Antifragile Software with Microservices:

• Extracting components into Microservices
• Building, Deploying and Managing Effective Unix-style Microservice Pipelines
• Simplifying Microservice Management using Immutable Service Deployments
• Designing and Implementing Reactive Microservices
• Applying effective health and monitoring for microservices
• Designing and Implementing Microservice Failover and Auto-Recovery Strategies using the Circuit Breaker Pattern and Friends
• Designing and Implementing for Autonomy with Microservice ‘Cells'
• Enabling Governance and Innovation with Microservices
• Enabling Variation and Experimentation in Languages and Frameworks through Microservices
• Testing stressors for failure to avoid failure
• Testing and Continuous Delivery for Microservices

I hope you can make it!

I've started a new meet up group in London especially for those interested in getting the real advantages of microservices and sharing their experiences on the way.

To get the ball rolling I'm going to be kicking off the user group with an inaugural meet up at Skills Matter on Thursday 12th June, 2014. The title of the talk is "Separating Fact from Fiction: What do Microservices really look like?" and it's going to be a real show-and-tell on the challenges of building a microservices-based system.

I hope you can join me for this event!

Additional Announcement! We'll be raffling a ticket to µCon: The Microservices Conference at the meet up as well! Current list price for the ticket is £200 on an early-bird discount, but will be going up to ∞500 nearer the event so this is a pretty good raffle prize!

Additional, Additional Announcement! As well as the above talk by Russ Miles, Gawain Hammond will also give a talk on innovation in relation to his experiences at Sky:

"The origin of species: evolution and innovation"

In this talk, Gawain Hammond will explain why your toe cheese is more innovative than you, what can make you better at innovation, and how to help your organisation to reap the benefits. We have a lot to learn from bacteria, they have survived for millions of years, far longer than your company. But what characteristics ensure success? And how can microservices help us emulate their success against all the odds?

Additional, Additional, Additional Announcement! I (Russ) will be giving away three free copies of my book, "Building Antifragile Software with Microservices" to the three best questions on microservices asked through Twitter prior to this event.

I love books, it's why I keep trying to write them...

Here is a list of books that I recommend for various topics.

Here's what I recommend (so far):

• "Antifragile" by Naseem Nicholas Taleb
• "Antifragile Software" by me
• Simon Brown's "Software Architecture for Developers"

Here's what I recommend (so far):

• "The Art of Travel" by Alain de Botton

Here's what I recommend (so far):

• "The Consolations of Philosophy" by Alain de Botton

I'll be extending this list out as I journey through life. If you have recommendations of great books then please don't hesitate to either leave a comment here or ping me on twitter, @russmiles

Like all good and simple technical phrases, there’s always room for misinterpretation and confusion (that luckily leads to large bonuses for consultants and large support contracts for vendors, not to mention the lucrative possibility of certification!). So following in the well-trodden and money-paved path of our elders in the Reactive and Agile movements, we’ve decided that we’d like to start a pyramid scheme of our own around … #microservices.

After at least 20 minutes of vague scanning of the web and caffeine-driven discussion, we’ve come up with the following ‘clear’ key principles for the “Microservices Manifesto(TM)” (helpfully collated from too many sources to attribute/blame directly).

The undersigned illumaniti state that Microservices value:

• Being antifragile.
• Being darwinian in nature.
• Being exactly 100 lines long.
• Be in its own process.
• Using lightweight mechanisms to work with other microservices.
• Being independent.
• Do one thing, and do it well (as opposed to not doing it well…)
• Being independently deployable
• Being small and self-contained
• Being consumer-driven contacts
• Being clearly bounded
• Being discrete (and discreet?)
• Have “just enough” validation
• Being one business capacility
• Being isolated, and separate from other things
• Being named
• Being a sub-process
• Being able to scale well
• Being small
• Being small enough to throw away
• Have no shared DTOs
• Use REST at all times
• Use the right protocol for the context
• Being organic
• Being hot and new, and confusing
• Embrace fall-back
• Being self-healing
• Being about components
• Being the smallest level of abstraction possible, but no smaller
• Being resilient
• Being decentralised

To ensure that things look more established and solid than they are, we then completed the following signed version of this manifesto so that we could be the only people that signed it for prosperity (our prosperity to be clear).

Like all good manifestos, if you’re not doing the above you’re not doing microservices. It is our hope that this definition will cause widespread and wasteful intellectual war over a term that was simple and useful in the first place. After all, how else are we all going to make some money!?

In addition we’d like to announce the formation of the Microservice Alliance and Certified Microservice Architect Master(TM) training programme. 

Due to demand this certification is only available for those willing to swap pre-paid tickets for Virgin Galactic’s early flights, but we think you’ll agree that the rarified air of being able to describe yourself as a certified Microservices Architect will more than make up for that pesky trip-of-a-lifetime into space.

All impenetrable and confusing manifestos and technologies require a cute logo to pretend that the the approach or technology is actually friendly and approachable. Ours is no exception. After several rounds of voting the blessed signatories of our manifesto here in Holland have selected the current logo that can be found at the beginning of this manifesto.

For those not sure what it is, we were going for an emphasis on ‘micro’, and so selected a cuddly-toy version of the Chlamydia virus. Other options were considered, most notably MRSA shown below:

The advantage of these logos is that they are already marketable commodities available on Amazon here, and here.

We believe our choice of logo accurately reflects our hope that our manifesto will spread like a virus and confuse the world in its erroneous understanding of what the one, true microservice manifesto should be.

Just in case it’s not entirely obvious … this was just for fun! To point out the conflicting views and confusion around microservices.

Today my attendees on the #antifragilesoftware course, the ’signatories’ above, have been creating microservices in order to construct systems that thrive on change and encourage de-centralised innovation, and creating this manifesto was some fun at the beginning of the day to highlight just how varied definitions are, and how we can ignore them when we look just for the benefits (which are the #antifragile qualities of a software system).

To be clear, I am philosophically opposed to ossifying manifestos, but that’s a subject for another blog post…