The Hard Truths about Microservices and Software Delivery

Wednesday, December 7, 2016 - 2:45pm3:30pm

Anders Wallgren, Chief Technology Officer, Electric Cloud and Avantika Mathur, Product Manager, ElectricFlow

Abstract: 

Everybody’s talking about Microservices right now. But are you having trouble figuring out what it means for you?

As software organizations continue to invest in achieving faster release cycles and Continuous Delivery (CD) of their applications, we see increased interest in microservices architectures, which—on the face of it—seems like a natural fit for enabling CD.

With Microservices, what was once one application, with self-contained processes, is now a complex set of independent services that connect via the network. Each microservice is developed and deployed independently, often using different languages, technology stacks, and tools. While Microservices support agility—particularly on the development side—they come with many technical challenges that greatly impact your software delivery pipelines, as well as other operations downstream.

  • Are you considering Microservices?
  • Do they make sense for your particular use case?
  • What are some of the “gotchas” you should be aware of?
  • Are you looking for best practices on how to get started with microservices?
  • Are you looking for tips for designing your delivery pipeline(s) for microservice-driven apps?
  • How will your existing practices need to change to take advantage of microservices?

This session outlines some of the hard truths and challenges with microservices—among them the impact of the mono/micro hybrid state; increased pipeline variations; enforcing governance and compliance standards; complexities of integration testing and monitoring and operations across the growing heterogeneous environments; and difficulties around system-level visibility and management.

Next we will outline concrete best practices on how to address these challenges as you get started with implementing microservices and designing your pipeline and processes to support microservices-driven applications.

Anders Wallgren, Electric Cloud

Anders Wallgren is Chief Technology Officer at Electric Cloud. Anders has over 25 years’ experience designing and building commercial software. Prior to joining Electric Cloud, he held executive positions at Aceva, Archistra, and Impresse, and management positions at Macromedia (MACR), Common Ground Software, and Verity (VRTY), where he played critical technical leadership roles in delivering award winning technologies such as Macromedia’s Director 7. Anders holds a BSc. from MIT. He has previously presented at Agile 2016, Velocity Amsterdam, DevOps Enterprise Summit 2014 and 2015, and PuppetConf, to name a few.

Avantika Mathur, ElectricFlow

Avan (Avantika) Mathur is the Product Manager for ElectricFlow. In her previous role, Avan was the Global Technical Account Manager at Electric Cloud, helping large enterprises across Finserv, Retail and Embedded accelerate their DevOps adoption. Avan has worked with customers to design complex automation solutions and optimize their delivery pipeline, to speed up software-driven innovation and increase Agile throughput. Avan holds a degree in Computer science. Prior to Electric Cloud, she worked as a software engineer at IBM for five years as a Linux kernel developer.

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BibTeX
@conference {201494,
author = {Anders Wallgren and Avantika Mathur},
title = {The Hard Truths about Microservices and Software Delivery},
year = {2016},
address = {Boston, MA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = dec
}

Presentation Video 

Presentation Audio