Douglas Squirrel, confirmed speaker for this year's inaugural µCon conference in London, will be giving an early teaser into his insights into building microservice-based architectures in a free evening talk on June 17th at Skills Matter.

At the same time I'll be in Poland at Ace! Conference so I won't be able to make it in person, but I hope you can make it as Douglas' talk looks very interesting and a great follow-on from my initial London Microservices Meetup the week before.

Really pleased to be able to show off the fantastic µCon poster designed by the amazing Annabella Macris and the Skills Matter team!

In collaboration with the Technology Transformation Network, I'll be hosting an evening event for senior executives and IT leads on July 16th in London.

Key questions I'll be attempting to address and discuss will include:

• How do you encourage innovation in a large organisation? What are the key technical and cultural barriers?
  
• How do you safely take advantage of innovative emerging technology in a large organisation, where you may not have the requisite experience?
  
• Once innovation has been successful, how do you attempt to bring that back into the fold in a way that is both safe but takes the most from the lessons learned during the journey?
  

It's going to be a fascinating evening, and spaces are limited to just 22 attendees. 

If you'd like to attend please use the contact information on the event announcement on the TTN site.

I'm really pleased to announce that Jeppe Cramon will be speaking at µCon: The Microservices Conference.

Jeppe will be diving through the contentious and interesting topic of "Microservices - SOA reminded of what it was supposed to deliver?".

Tickets are going really fast so grab yours today at the early-bird price of £200.

I'm very pleased to announce that the second meet up event of the London Microservices User Group has been announced!

Provisionally titled "Clustering Considered Harmful: Simplifying your System with Microservices", this second free event will feature David Dawson, Principal Consultant at Simplicity Itself, sharing his experience of building microservice-based systems on the foundations of immutability to remove the immediate need for the complexity and false robustness of clustering.

After the huge success of the first meet up, sign-up now for this event to avoid the waiting list!

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!

At QCon London this year there was one tweet that really stood out for me. The tweet went "QCon London: Microservices, microservices, blah, blah, microservices". It was a fair summary.

The interesting thing is that I've been harking on about using simple, single-purpose components in order to enable the properties of antifragility in software now for a couple of years. I'm just about to launch a course on the subject, and what excited me was that in fact what was being branded as microservices at that point was what I was simply referring to 'adaptable components'. So, for me, microservices works.

After just about every conversation I had after QCon being dominated by the subject I felt, and so did Skills Matter, that it was time to take things to the next level and so µCon (pronounced, and hash tagged, as 'muCon') was born.

But why do we need this conference? Here are my reasons.

Any company that can innovate rapidly and successfully has a competitive advantage in modern times. Just take a look at Netflix, a relative newcomer who is generally scaring the proverbials out of the resident incumbents.

Netflix, and other innovative companies, is not just down to processes and practices, it's down to philosophy. Netflix designed and architected for unpredictability from the word go, both in terms of requirements and runtime conditions. They coined the term 'cloud native' for this style of architecture, and it is made up of another term they adopted 'microservices'. I think these terms are a little too implementation specific, what they are in fact achieving is antifragility in that they have designed and architected to thrive on change in requirements as well as to thrive in the face of runtime instability.

Netflix have designed microservices so that their system is antifragile, while accepting that some services can be fragile, some may be robust. Antifragility is a property of the system itself, and microservices have as an underlying implementation choice been the natural destination to achieve this valuable antifragile property.

If your software system can thrive on change both at design and runtime, this means it can adapt as fast as your agile company might need it to. This is the most exciting thing that microservices underpin, the fact that you might be able to innovate as fast as you can. 

We've spent over 10 years now becoming agile in our processes and practices, even our organisations, but our software architecture and design has had difficulty keeping up. 

It's not just about comprehension and clean code, the software itself needs to be designed with change in mind. This is where simple, single-purpose services that do one thing well and are able to live and failover and deal with transient environmental conditions successfully are so important. It's no surprise that these are the natural properties of a system that is labelled as following a micro service architecture.

So why a conference? Well, the fact is that with any new set of priorities, principles and approaches that hit software development, there is a lot of confusion out there.

You can see this confusion in ongoing discussions around "What is a microservice?", or even "Isn't a microservice architecture just SOA?". These are important discussions, but they tend to cloud the real underlying properties that are being sought, those that I'm characterising as innovation enabled by antifragility.

So this conference intends to set the record straight. To share real-world experiences of building microservices architected systems and how they enabled the benefits, such as antifragility, that they were aiming for. We're going to discuss values, principles, architecture, design and real implementation techniques. This won't be for the faint-hearted, but it will be a heck of a lot of fun!

So if you're interested in building software that can adapt as fast as you and your business can, then this could well be the one conference you need to be at this year. If that hasn't sold you on the conference, then the forthcoming speaker announcements surely will do, and let's not forget the obligatory evening-keynote and launch party on the first night.

Microservices holds a lot of promise, and so I hope to see you there at µCon in November. 

It's going to be an amazing learning experience and a lot of seriously technical fun, and right now it only costs £200 for two-days as well, so get in early while the earlybird discount is still available!

It's been a long time since I wrote anything publicly (ok, a VERY long time) and although I used to find the experience fun, rewarding and amazingly cathartic, I just dropped easily out of the habit in a cloud of disillusionment, fear and, for want of a better word, 'meh'.

So now I'm back. I'm not sure what I'm going to write but what I can promise is that it'll be honest, at times funny, at other times perhaps shocking but regardless, I'm going to have some fun with this this time.