Automation and Traceability With Separation of Concerns Part of the battle against complexity is ‘divide and conquer.’ Separating out portions of a process with limited connections can lead to easier development and comprehension. One separation that is relatively easy to identify and implement is partitioning application code and deployment description…

Share data seamlessly across instances — When I was first introduced to stateless services, I had difficulty getting past the “where’s the beef?” thinking. What good is a service that can’t remember anything from request to request? I gradually began to understand that the trick to stateless services is all states must be persisted after every…

Why not both? — There are lots of reasons that people argue for microservices. But the monolith has one big reason…simplicity. One service that does it all, only one set of source code. The boilerplate associated with a service doesn’t have to be duplicated. And sharing code isn’t a problem. My previous article on…

Using Spring Boot Sleuth to overcome reactive Java’s thread free-for-all — In a previous article, I was able to overcome reactive Java’s problem with maintaining context on a per-thread basis. The main issue is that reactive Java requests can be handled by different threads, so we can’t rely on the popular MDC facility of Java logging. The strategy I came up…

How not to look like a noob. — Reactive Java has been around for almost a decade now but I still see people that are struggling with it and, even worse, abusing it. So I thought I’d jot down the kinds of things I never want to see in a pull request. 1. Blocking This should be obvious. It’s supposed…

Java microservices without Docker Desktop on macOS — If you haven’t heard by now, Docker Desktop will charge a subscription fee for companies with more than 250 employees or more than 10 million dollars in revenue. It’s not a huge fee, and if your company is already using Docker Hub private repositories, I believe you’re covered. But it…

Moving away from thread-based context — Microservices tend to do one thing and are dependent on other microservices for help in performing a complete transaction. As the action ping-pongs through the services, it helps to have a trace ID so you can tell who’s making the requests. …

Using Event Sourcing to implement CQRS — Command Query Responsibility Separation (CQRS) is a pattern in service architecture. It is a separation of concerns, that is, separation of services that write from services that read. Why would you want to separate read and write services? One of the advantages of microservices is the ability to scale services…

Staying cool, calm, and collected with a little preparation. — When I interview people I’m always optimistic that we’ll find the next great developer in our company. Unfortunately, it doesn’t often work out that way. People are rejected for a number of reasons, sometimes just because they don’t seem comfortable during the interview and that gives the impression that they…