Title: Building Microservices
Author: Sam Newman
Publication year: 2015
Pages: 250
The first edition of this book, which is the one I have, was released in 2015 (second edition is yet to be published at the moment I wrote this review).
It’s funny, while I was thinking about how the book was written I’d realized that Sam Newman have applied the same principle of splitting a monolith into microservices to the way he wrote the book. Each chapter touches one aspect of microservices. Deploying, testing, monitoring, security and so on.
Kidding aside, I found it incredibly good for developers and software architects. Experienced or not. He shows the problem that microservices solves and the tradeoffs. Although it is not a “how-to” book Newman uses a fictional company to explain the concepts which is very useful.
In my opinion, it’s nice to have a previous knowledge in Domain Drive Design (DDD), specially the concept of bounded contexts. So if you not familiar with this subject, it’s really worth dedicating some time to read about.
If you are interested in splitting a monolith chapter 3 and 5 you will probably find what you looking for. Not only will you learn how to do it but also the reasons why you should not split it.
At the end of each chapter there’s a summary with recommendations for further information. This is very helpful for those who want to go deeper in a subject.
In chapter “Microservices at scale” Sam gives us a brief of very important topics such as caching, CQRS, bulkhead, circuit breaker and timeouts. These terms are widely used by companies that have already been developing microservices.
Conclusion:
Overall I truly recommend reading this book, it’s straightforward, well written, the structure is easy to follow and it’s organized. It has only 260 pages, with very insightful information though.
Denis Capeto 