Mark Richards
New England Software Symposium
Boston · September 28 - 30, 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 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.
The Move Towards Modularity
It seems like all we talk about these days is making our architectures more modular. However, several questions emerge when moving towards a level of architectural modularity. What are the benefits? Why should you care? How far should you take architectural modularity? Should you use service-based architecture or move all the way to microservices? What is the best approach for moving to microservices? In this keynote I'll address all of these questions so that you'll fully understand the rationale for this important trend and also understand a solid approach for moving to microservices.