The Magic of Small Things - 10 Years of Microservices

GOTO Copenhagen 2024

The early years of the second decade of the twenty-first century. A world where Docker was a job people did; K8S was a boyband (probably); Kafka was a euphemism for existential anxiety and Chaos Engineering meant, well, nothing as it hadn’t been invented yet. The Cloud … that was just weather to most people.

It is 2012, and Microservices appeared on the Thoughtworks Technology Radar. 10 years ago, in 2014, Martin Fowler and James Lewis wrote down something that caused a bit of a stir – the definition of Microservices. 10 years later, for better or worse, Microservices have become the predominant architectural style for building software at scale.

So much innovation has occurred in the last decade – Docker and K8S fulfilled the ‘write once and run anywhere’ promise of the JVM. Operations changed beyond recognition as we moved to Cloud Native and FaaS. Testing in Production is a practice that now signifies maturity rather than derangement.

In this keynote, James takes a look at the original nine characteristics of Microservices and explores the lessons we’ve learnt since those halcyon days. (Although Kafka is still a euphemism for existential anxiety.)