Articles by Lee

Take a look at the article Microservice Architectures: What They Are and Why You Should Use Them, written by me and published by New Relic. This is an update and extension to the article “Why Use Microservices?

An updated copy of my book, Architecting for Scale, published by O’Reilly Media, is available for download.

This is the second version under the early release program. The full book is scheduled to be released in May.

One of the most important topics in architecting for scalable systems is availability. While there are some companies and some services where a certain amount of downtime is reasonable and expected, most businesses cannot have any downtime at all without it impacting their customer’s satisfaction, and ultimately their company’s bottom line.

How do you keep your customers happily using your service and keep your company’s revenue coming in? You keep your service operational as much as possible. There is a direct and meaningful correlation between system availability, and customer satisfaction.

Traditionally, software companies created large, monolithic applications. The single monolith encompasses all business activities for a single application. As the company grew, so did the monolith. In this model, implementing an improved piece of business functionality requires developers to make changes within the single application, often with many other developers attempting to make changes to the same single application.