Hugh McKee is a skilled back-end developer, and developer advocate with decades of experience building enterprise applications. Specializing in large-scale, cloud-based systems, Hugh is dedicated to learning new technologies and sharing his knowledge with others. As a developer advocate, he speaks at conferences worldwide and is the author of "Designing Reactive Systems: The Role Of Actors In Distributed Architecture." With a passion for teaching and evolving his software engineering skills, Hugh is a valuable contributor to the tech community.
Are Your Microservices Small Balls of Mud?
Microservices continue to gain tremendous popularity given their potential benefits like independent deployability, polyglot implementations, and alignment with team organization. However, more organizations are finding microservices introduce significant complexities, especially at scale. It's easy for microservices to become an entangled mess of poor abstractions, failed transactions, unreliable communication, and technical debt accrued across versions. In this talk, I will make the case that many microservice implementations suffer from being small balls of mud. You will learn the telltale signs of systems exhibiting this anti-pattern, like services knowing too much about each other, brittle synchronous messaging architectures, failed deploys, blocking teams, and more. I propose event-driven architecture as an alternative model that solves many microservice woes. We will compare synchronous vs asynchronous messaging approaches. I will use non-trivial example design and code reviews to demonstrate how event-driven services remain decoupled using publish/subscribe messaging. I will also showcase transactional consistency benefits using event sourcing/CQRS patterns. And more. You will leave recognizing mud in your systems and equipped with practical architectural guidance to evolve towards event-driven services incrementally. By swapping microservice mud for event-driven clarity, teams can scale complexity without getting stuck. Join me as we explore if events offer the missing pillar for reliable, sustainable microservice architectures.
2024 Workshops
Full-day, deep dive, hands-on workshops
Get a full day of training on these topics from industry experts!
Sessions
JConf.dev 2024 sessions
Many more sessions to be announced soon!
Timeline
- January 1
2024 Kickoff
Call for Papers, Early Bird tickets sales (first 100 only, then prices +$100), sponsor sales, scholarship program all open
- January 31
CFP Close
CFP Closes
- March 1
Speakers Announced!
Speakers announced, regular ticket sales
- July 1
Late ticket sales
Late ticket sales, order now to get a swanky badge and tshirt
- September 24
Workshop day!
JConf.dev 2024 starts with workshop day
- September 25
The big show!
JConf.dev 2024 begins!
