A retrospective on microservices, what we set out to do at Netflix, how it worked out, and how things have subsequently permeated across the industry, along with some of the [mis]appropriations etc. that have since happened. The first talks I gave at QCon SF in 2011 and QCon London in 2012 were on the Netflix cloud architecture. We subsequently agreed to call it microservices and started open sourcing components of the architecture, and the term really took off in 2013 along with the launch of Docker and containers. Looking back at the original ideas and motivations, most of the core concepts were adopted, but some key ideas went missing along the way. This has led to some of the complaints we hear today about things that are hard to do with microservices in practice, that we anticipated and solved for at the time.
Speaker
Adrian Cockcroft
Former VP Amazon Sustainability Architecture @Amazon
Adrian Cockcroft has had a long career working at the leading edge of technology. He’s always been fascinated by what comes next, and he writes and speaks extensively on a range of subjects. He joined Amazon as their VP of Cloud Architecture Strategy in 2016, recruited and leads their open source community engagement team. He was previously a Technology Fellow at Battery Ventures. There he advised the firm and its portfolio companies about technology issues and also assists with deal sourcing and due diligence. Before joining Battery, Adrian helped lead Netflix’s migration to a large scale, highly available public-cloud architecture and the open sourcing of the cloud-native NetflixOSS platform. Prior to that at Netflix he managed a team working on personalization algorithms and service-oriented refactoring. Adrian was a founding member of eBay Research Labs, developing advanced mobile applications and even building his own homebrew phone, years before iPhone and Android launched. As a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems he wrote the best-selling “Sun Performance and Tuning” book and was chief architect for High Performance Technical Computing. He graduated from The City University, London with a Bsc in Applied Physics and Electronics, and was named one of the top leaders in Cloud Computing in 2011 and 2012 by SearchCloudComputing magazine.
