Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems

Written by Sam Newman

Narrated by Theodore O'Brien

Newly adapted for audiobook listeners.

As organizations shift from monolithic applications to smaller, self-contained microservices, distributed systems have become more fine-grained. But developing these new systems brings its own host of problems. This expanded second edition takes a holistic view of topics that you need to consider when building, managing, and scaling microservices architectures.

Through clear examples and practical advice, author Sam Newman gives everyone from architects and developers to testers and IT operators a firm grounding in the concepts. You'll dive into the latest solutions for modeling, integrating, testing, deploying, and monitoring your own autonomous services. Real-world cases reveal how organizations today manage to get the most out of these architectures.

Microservices technologies continue to move quickly. This book brings you up to speed.

Get new information on user interfaces, container orchestration, and serverless
Align system design with your organization's goals
Explore options for integrating a service with your system
Understand how to independently deploy microservices
Examine the complexities of testing and monitoring distributed services
Manage security with expanded content around user-to-service and service-to-service models

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ascent Audio
• Release date: Jan 23, 2022
• ISBN: 9781663727664

Sam Newman

After spending time at multiple startups and 12 years at ThoughtWorks, Sam Newman is now an independent consultant. Specializing in microservices, cloud, and continuous delivery, Sam helps clients around the world deliver software faster and more reliably through training and consulting. Sam is an experienced speaker who has spoken at conferences across the world, and is the author of Building Microservices from O'Reilly Media.

Reviews for Building Microservices

[Andrii Koretskyi · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The book itself is good. The ToC is awful. The book is just almost randomly divided into big chunks

[naleagdeco · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This has been my most enjoyable software design read since Release It! a few years ago (and I'm sad I waited so long to read it.)

I'm currently 1/3rd (I imagine) through the process of moving our software from a monolithic service into a microservice and more importantly one with multitenant customer integrations. I've been following the topics on this book through a variety of blog posts, other books (which expand on particular details of sections in his book) and conference videos.

In retrospect I wish I had started by reading this book so that I'd have a clear starting reference all in one place vs. seeing all those things fit together in a guided introduction.

Sam Newman is a very good technical writer, all of his text is clear, never too detailed and never too absract. His text is no-nonsense and that works well given this book's relatively short length for its wide scope.

The book starts with describing microservices and their supposed benefits. It then discusses important planning consideratinos (not just technical, business ones too!) before starting down this path, before going into strategies for starting to split one's monolithic service. The bulk of the book then becomes about particular considerations and possibly high-level approaches to a variety of software design aspects in a microservice context.

Those second and third chapters, about planning an architecture and about how to approach converting one's existing service, are increedibly useful to me. They aren't complete solutions, but they are approaches and considerations with enough guiderails that someone can start thinking about this for their particular situation.

Almost every other chapter provided at least one gleam of insight that I'll have to think about more at length, alongside the surveys of common microservice patterns for any particular aspect of running a software service.

If you are starting down the path of considering a microservice implementation, or are a developer inexperienced with how microservice architecture works, I highly recommend this book to see overall design philosophies and a lot of considerations about where one software's should be before beginning and also possible areas to start.

[lucasmcgregor · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Light on specifics, but good coverage of a slighted topic. The book should be required for serious developers who want to work in the backend/Internet space. My biggest irk is that none of this is new, you should look at RM-ODP or other older specs for a more thought out designs and concerns.