I’ve received some great feedback after posting my proposal for a microservice maturity/classification model last week, some positive, and some negative. Some private communications suggested that I may be getting caught up in the marketing hype, and several emails suggested that the microservice architecture really is just classical SOA re-invented. Other emails balanced out these comments by suggesting that microservices ...

A micro approach to a macro problem? The microservice hype is everywhere, and although the industry can’t seem to agree on an exact definition, we are repeatedly told that moving away from a monolithic application to a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) consisting of small services is the correct way to build and evolve software systems. However, there is currently an absence ...

After attending Sam Newman’s microservice talks at Geecon last week I started to think more about what is most likely an essential feature of service-oriented / microservice platforms for monitoring, reporting and diagnostics: correlation ids. Correlation ids allow distributed tracing within complex service oriented platforms, where a single request into the application can often be dealt with by multiple downstream ...

Testing Web-based Spring Applications in 2013 (Part One) A fellow LJCer and TDD/BDD advocate has recently started developing an application using the ever-popular Spring stack, and he asked my advice on how best to implement a Test-driven methodology within this context. I started typing an email back in response, but then it suddenly occurred to me that this might be useful for ...

Quite a common use case when developing a Spring application is that you want to have multiple versions of configuration properties depending on where you are deploying to, for example, database URLs or feature flag may be environment specific on dev, qa, production etc. Like most Spring development tasks, there are several way to solve the problem. My preference is ...