Tanzu Talk

In this episode

Sometimes you feel like a microservice, sometimes you feel like a monolith. In this episode, Coté talks with Nate Schutta about his new book Responsible Microservices: when to use them, when to use a service mesh, the (false?) hope of polyglot programming, monolithic shaming, and giant zucchinis.

Topics:

Nate has a new book out, Responsible Microservices, free from VMware Tanzu. As the name implies, it discusses choosing when to do microservices and when not to…and some of the hows.

There are so many options for putting in the management bits of microservices - in a service mesh like Istio, in a container/kubernetes sidecar, or right in the app code itself. How do you choose?

“Architects do things that haven’t been turned into frameworks yet.”

Then we start discussing governance and enterprise architecture

Case studies of failed parental advice transformation on finding things and doing laundry.

Using decision trees to narrow technical choices, and guide architectural decisions.

Enterprise architecture will force (allow?) developers to focus more on the actual application rather than deciding on all the supporting frameworks, services, and policies. This might be restrictive, but it frees those developers up.

We then discuss polyglot programming, a popular topic and, usually, something developers want. But, as we discuss, it’s probably not a great idea to go too crazy: a couple of languages only is idea.

Of course, you’ll accumulate applications written in all sorts of languages over time, as you acquire companies, and so forth. But, as always, too much variation causes efficiency and productivity problems.

Next, we discuss enterprise architecture processes, how governance decisions are made over time. You know, meetings.

Jana Werner’s interview - your cycle time is determined by your internal meeting cadence. I then try to nail down an opinion on The Monolith.

Everyone says the monolith is bad, microservices are better. Monolith shaming!

But, then, mysteriously many people say to use a monolith most of the time, sort of. For example, where are all the talks and books about new monolith patterns?

Can we just finally say don’t do monoliths?

Find Nate in Twitter: @ntschutta.