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Building Microservices: is it worth reading?
The standard reference on service decomposition, with a genuinely good chapter on how testing has to change.
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- published
- 2021
- key ideas
- 3
Building Microservices
Designing Fine-Grained Systems
by Sam Newman
- Publisher
- O'Reilly
- Year
- 2021
- Edition
- Second edition, substantially rewritten.
- ISBN
- 9781492034025
Useful when you are: Senior / lead
Verdict
Should you read it?
Read it if
You test a service-based system and end-to-end testing has become the bottleneck, which it reliably does past a handful of services.
Skip it if
You work on a monolith and have no plans to decompose. Newman would probably tell you to stay there.
The argument
What it argues
Newman covers decomposition, integration, deployment and operation of fine-grained services, and is notably even-handed about the costs rather than evangelising the pattern.
The testing chapter is the relevant one here. End-to-end testing across many services requires everything deployed together, which reintroduces exactly the coordination that independent services were meant to remove. Newman argues for consumer-driven contract testing as the answer, and for accepting more production testing and monitoring in exchange.
The second edition is markedly more cautious about microservices than the first, which is a point in its favour.
Key ideas
Ideas worth taking from it
- 01
Consumer-driven contracts
The consumer defines expectations, the provider verifies them independently, and neither needs the other deployed. The practical alternative to cross-team integration testing.
- 02
The end-to-end testing trap
End-to-end tests across services get slower, flakier and more expensive as service count rises, and the coordination required undermines independent deployment.
- 03
Testing in production
Synthetic monitoring, canary releases and progressive delivery as legitimate parts of a testing strategy rather than an admission of failure.
Criticism
What has dated, and what it gets wrong
Long, and the testing material is one chapter in a large architecture book, so it is an expensive way to get to the contract testing argument. If that is what you want, the Pact documentation covers it more directly.
Keep reading
What to read next
Reading about quality is cheaper than learning it in production.
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