Mark Richards
Salt Lake Software Symposium
Salt Lake City · June 8 - 9, 2018
Independent Software Architect, Author of Fundamentals of Software Architecture
Mark Richards is an experienced, hands-on software architect involved in the architecture, design, and implementation of microservices architectures, service-oriented architectures, and distributed systems. He has been in the software industry since 1983 and has significant experience and expertise in application, integration, and enterprise architecture. Mark is the founder of DeveloperToArchitect.com, a website devoted to helping developers in the journey to software architect. He is the author of numerous technical books and videos, including the recently published Fundamentals of Software Architecture, Microservices AntiPatterns and Pitfalls, Microservices vs. SOA, the Software Architecture Fundamentals video series, The Enterprise Messaging video series, Java Message Service, 2nd Edition, and contributing author to 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know. Mark has a master’s degree in computer science and is a regular conference speaker at the No Fluff Just Stuff (NFJS) Symposium Series. He has spoken at hundreds of conferences and user groups around the world on a variety of enterprise-related technical topics.
Presentations
Microservices Architecture Fundamentals (UberConf)
Microservices continues to be the latest buzzword in the industry, and probably will be for some time. If you are not sure what microservices is or want to start getting your feet wet in understanding the basics of this architecture style, then this session is just right for you. In this session I will cover the basics of the microservices architecture pattern. We'll talk about distributed architecture, what a microservice is, what the bounded context means, how to determine the right level of service granularity, the dangers of inter-service communication, and the role of the API layer. By the end of this session you will have a good idea of what the microservices architecture style is all about and whether it is a good fit for you.
Microservices and Distributed Data
Jorge Santayana is famous for saying “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. When SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) was all the craze, everyone got all excited about services, but forgot about the data. This ended in disaster. History repeats itself, and here we are with Microservices, where everyone is all excited about services, but once again, forgets all about the data. In this session I will discuss some of the challenges associated with breaking apart monolithic databases, and then show the techniques for effectively creating data domains and how to split apart a database. I consider the data part of Microservices the hardest aspect of this architecture style. In the end, it's all about the data.
Microservices Communication Patterns
Once you break things apart into microservices, you must then put them back together. In other words, individual services still sometimes need to talk to one another to complete a given business transaction, whether that transaction is synchronous or asynchronous. In this session I talk about the various patterns of communication within microservices - orchestration, aggregation, and adapters. I also talk about coupling between services, including stamp coupling and bandwidth issues, and how to address these common communication woes.
Microservices Caching Strategies
Have you ever wondered how to share data between microservices? Have you ever wondered how to share a single database schema between hundreds (or even thousands) of microservices (cloud or on-prem)? Have you ever wondered how to version relational database changes when sharing data in a microservices environment? If any of these questions intrigue you, then you should come to this session. In this session I will describe and demonstrate various caching strategies and patterns that you can use in Microservices to significantly increase performance, manage common data in a highly distributed architecture, and even manage data synchronization from cloud-based microservices. I'll describe the differences between a distributed and replicated cache, Using live coding and demos using Hazelcast and Apache Ignite, I'll demonstrate how to share data and also how to do space-based microservices, leveraging caching to its fullest extent.
Applying Reactive Architecture Patterns
Reactive architecture patterns allow you to build self-monitoring, self-scaling, self-growing, and self-healing systems that can react to both internal and external conditions without human intervention. These kind of systems are known as autonomic systems (our human body is one example). In this session I will show you some of the most common and most powerful reactive patterns you can use to automatically scale systems, grow systems, and self-repair systems, all using the basic language API and simple messaging. Through code samples in Java and actual run-time demonstrations, I'll show you how the patterns work and also show you sample implementations. Get ready for the future of software architecture - that you can start implementing on Monday.
Streaming Architecture Using Kafka (UberConf)
There are many different uses for Apache Kafka. It can be used as a streaming broker, event broker for transactional data, and even a database. This session is about understanding streaming architecture and how to implement it using Apache Kafka. I start this session by talking about some of the streaming architecture patterns, then dive into how Apache Kafka works using the Core API. Using live coding examples in Apache Kafka, I also talk about the differences between Kafka and regular messaging (RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ, etc.) and when you should use each. I end this session by putting everything together, showing an actual streaming architecture using Kafka within a Microservice ecosystem for gathering various metrics for business and operational monitoring and reporting.