Continuing my up-skilling on cloud security, I wanted to get a better handle on application architectures that map into cloud computing patterns and while micro services aren’t a cloud specific architecture, the key goals of loose coupling, high scalability, etc align well to a cloud environment so I figured this would be a good book to have a a read through.
The first two chapters are very easy reads, covering an introduction to micro services and their benefits, mapping strategic goals to principles and practices.
The next chapter introduces the fictional MusicCorp organisation and application that is used throughout the remainder of the book, demonstrating the concept of bounded contexts and how to apply it to a monolithic application. At this point the book really gets into more detailed discussions on the topics, with each of the further few chapters being pretty meaty in comparison to the earlier chapters. The rest of the chapter covers some of the key technologies that can be used to facilitate micro services (RPC, SOAP, REST, XML, JSON, message queues, etc) touching on both the positives and negatives of each and also covers area like versioning, choreography/orchestration and integration with COTS.
The author then expands on the MusicCorp example and uses it to demonstrate how to split out the application into multiple micro services, before moving on to CI topics like deployment and testing and a further short chapter on monitoring. For me the chapter on breaking a monolithic application into micro services wasn’t as relevant for what I was looking for, but it some of the high level approaches were interesting to understand how it may be tackled.
Security is touched on next but as the author mentions early on in the book, he’s not a security specialist so this is a fairly light chapter covering authn/authz and SSO, touching on OpenID Connect and SAML One nice thing to see in this chapter was a call to be frugal with data storage in light of potential data loss events, particularly where personally identifiable information may be in play. Nice touch!
The last main two chapters cover system/organisational design and micro services at scale, both of which I thought were great introduction on the topics. Too many organisations think concepts such as devops or micro services can simply be tacked on to their exist structure, but this chapter does a nice job of dispelling this myth. Chirstian Posta wrote a really good blog post on this specifically related to micro services and I'd also recommend Mike Cohn's chapter on team structure from his Succeeding with Agile book.
One aspect of the book that I really liked was the liberal use of links to other material and books when further more detailed explanations are merited. This avoids the author going off on tangents, which I often find many authors doing (sometimes as a necessity to explain a concept… and sometimes just to pad the book).
I’m not a developer or application architect so at times the book goes slightly into too much detail for what I needed, but to be fair this only rarely happens and so doesn’t detract from the overall flow. Of course that probably means for someone who is a developer or application architect that it won’t go into enough detail, which sometime that is held out by other reviewers.
From a security perspective, I’d highly recommend this book as a great way to get up to speed on how applications should/will be deployed in the cloud and microservices in general. Additionally, if you're still working in a very specialised/siloed organisation, this should be up there to read to understand how things may change. Ultimately, if your organisation isn’t doing something in this space now, then they will soon and you may as well be up to speed!
Links:
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Building-Microservices-Sam-Newman/dp/1491950358
Safari: https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/building-microservices/9781491950340/
The first two chapters are very easy reads, covering an introduction to micro services and their benefits, mapping strategic goals to principles and practices.
The next chapter introduces the fictional MusicCorp organisation and application that is used throughout the remainder of the book, demonstrating the concept of bounded contexts and how to apply it to a monolithic application. At this point the book really gets into more detailed discussions on the topics, with each of the further few chapters being pretty meaty in comparison to the earlier chapters. The rest of the chapter covers some of the key technologies that can be used to facilitate micro services (RPC, SOAP, REST, XML, JSON, message queues, etc) touching on both the positives and negatives of each and also covers area like versioning, choreography/orchestration and integration with COTS.
The author then expands on the MusicCorp example and uses it to demonstrate how to split out the application into multiple micro services, before moving on to CI topics like deployment and testing and a further short chapter on monitoring. For me the chapter on breaking a monolithic application into micro services wasn’t as relevant for what I was looking for, but it some of the high level approaches were interesting to understand how it may be tackled.
Security is touched on next but as the author mentions early on in the book, he’s not a security specialist so this is a fairly light chapter covering authn/authz and SSO, touching on OpenID Connect and SAML One nice thing to see in this chapter was a call to be frugal with data storage in light of potential data loss events, particularly where personally identifiable information may be in play. Nice touch!
The last main two chapters cover system/organisational design and micro services at scale, both of which I thought were great introduction on the topics. Too many organisations think concepts such as devops or micro services can simply be tacked on to their exist structure, but this chapter does a nice job of dispelling this myth. Chirstian Posta wrote a really good blog post on this specifically related to micro services and I'd also recommend Mike Cohn's chapter on team structure from his Succeeding with Agile book.
One aspect of the book that I really liked was the liberal use of links to other material and books when further more detailed explanations are merited. This avoids the author going off on tangents, which I often find many authors doing (sometimes as a necessity to explain a concept… and sometimes just to pad the book).
I’m not a developer or application architect so at times the book goes slightly into too much detail for what I needed, but to be fair this only rarely happens and so doesn’t detract from the overall flow. Of course that probably means for someone who is a developer or application architect that it won’t go into enough detail, which sometime that is held out by other reviewers.
From a security perspective, I’d highly recommend this book as a great way to get up to speed on how applications should/will be deployed in the cloud and microservices in general. Additionally, if you're still working in a very specialised/siloed organisation, this should be up there to read to understand how things may change. Ultimately, if your organisation isn’t doing something in this space now, then they will soon and you may as well be up to speed!
Links:
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Building-Microservices-Sam-Newman/dp/1491950358
Safari: https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/building-microservices/9781491950340/
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