Get Up to Speed With Microservices in 8 Hours

Everybody is talking microservices these days and Red Hat is doing some very cool developer events around the world. The latest one happened at the beginning of November 2015. The amazing speaker lineup starts with special guest speaker Tim Hockin from the Google Cloud Management team, and technical lead and co-founder of Kubernetes, along with Red Hat's James Strachan and Claus Ibsen. James created the Groovy programming language and is also a member of the Apache Software Foundation and a co-founder of a number of other open source projects such as: Apache ActiveMQ, Apache Camel, Apache ServiceMix. Claus Ibsen works on open source integration projects such as Apache Camel, fabric8, and hawtio, and is the author of Camel in Action books. Tim, James, Claus, and many more talk on areas such as Kubernetes for Java developers, microservices with Apache Camel, and mobile-centric architecture.

The complete 8-hour playlist is available for free on Youtube, and I just want to pick out some of my personal favorites.

Microservices in the Real World by Christian Posta

Beyond the many technology challenges of introducing microservices, organizations need to also adapt their existing development and operations processes and workflows to reap the bigger benefits of a microservices architecture including continuous delivery style application delivery. This session reviews challenges a number of large enterprises have faced in looking to adopt microservices, and looks at how they’ve adapted on their on-going journey. This session also covers some of the end architectures these companies used as they incorporated these new architectural approaches and technologies with their existing people skills and processes.

WildFly Swarm: Microservices Runtime by Lance Ball

With lightweight microservices dominating the dev chatter these days, traditional Java EE developers have spent a lot of time looking in the mirror and asking themselves, "Does my application look fat in this container?" or "How can I leverage my existing Java EE bits in a lightweight microservice?" or "What if I had Just Enough App Server™ to leverage the power and standards of Java EE, but did it all with a slimmed down, self-contained runnable that is easy to deploy and manage?" Well, maybe not that last one.

Enter WildFly Swarm. WildFly Swarm deconstructs the WildFly Java Application Server into fine-grained parts, allowing the selective reconstitution of those parts, together with your application into a self-contained executable - an "uberjar." The resulting artifact contains just enough Java EE to support whatever subset of the traditional APIs your application requires.

This talk introduces WildFly Swarm, and show you how it helps you bring your existing Java EE investments into the world of lightweight, easily deployed microservices. As a bonus, it shows you how WildFly Swarm helps you easily take advantage of other state-of-the-art components such as Keycloak, Ribbon, and Hystrix, integrating them seamlessly in your application.

Logging and Management for Microservices by Jimmi Dyson

Logging is a key part to making microservices work for you. This session helps you look at logs in a different way in order to understand what your systems are doing and how they’re interacting, in order to fix problems quickly and improve performance. You will understand the problems in collecting logs from your distributed microservices and discuss how to centralize them to get real value out of this goldmine of information.

Microservices Workflow: CI/CD by James Rawlings

We all know that in the real world there is more to developing than writing lines of code. This session explores how fabric8 has evolved to provide a platform that supports not only the development of microservices but also working with them, taking an idea from inception right through to running in a live environment.

With popular trends such as DevOps, we know that it is more about the culture of an organization that will give you greater agility and chance of success. Being able to communicate effectively with your cross functional teams increases productivity, reduces social conflicts, and establishes the all-important feedback loops.

We look at how fabric8 provides out-of-the-box integration for hosted git services in Gogs, as well as agile project management with Taiga and social tools such as Lets Chat and Slack, to enable intelligent, extendable automation using Hubot, while providing a platform that is designed for the new age microservices team.

It also covers the integration of popular logging and metric tools that are prerequisites to continuous improvement. We need to understand not only how the platform is operating but also greater visibility of how it’s being used. Being able to visualize how teams communication in and outside of their unit can be seen as first steps to measuring the culture within an organization. This can be extremely useful in identifying early signs of internal silos developing as well as learning from high-performing teams.

Look at the complete playlist on Youtube and find out more about the event and the other sessions on the redhat.com microservices developer day website.