Leading Technical Change across the Herd. Software has evolved from a team activity to teams activity: multiple teams, each with their own Microservices, where a single user request’s calls a service which then calls another service to look something up, which calls another service, etc. A single request may spawn many requests inside the…| blog.wilcoxd.com
In grooming and backlog refinement in software we find ourselves breaking functionality into epics, which then have many stories, and - from here I like to break stories explicitly into behaviors, or at least acceptance criteria. With stories classified into epics you may be able to, upon completion, see the larger business functionality, and where…| blog.wilcoxd.com
Introduction We’re all familiar with the idea of technical debt in software, where the velocity of development is hampered by code not being ideally suited for the task at hand. Maybe the task changed, maybe an engineer had an idea that didn’t turn out so well, maybe the data model forced an unnatural shape. for more on technical debt O’reilly has…| blog.wilcoxd.com
Intro A mid-2010s style MERN stack separates out backend and frontend concerns into separate deployable units (which we’ll call “projects” here), resulting in an architecture that looks something like this for a consumer web app with admin backend: In this diagram we have four projects: “Consumer Microservice”, “Consumer Frontend”, “Admin…| blog.wilcoxd.com
Intro For a good sized microservice herd it’s important to know how these services relate to each other. How much internal traffic does X service get, what’s the order of the microservices from the user’s request point of view, etc etc. Drawing this diagram shouldn’t, but often is, engineers “just knowing” the system in their heads then putting it…| blog.wilcoxd.com
Intro Ansible is a configuration management, multi-machine task running, DevOps automating declarative devops tool. I’ve used it for things so varied as developer machine setup, thought about using it as an abstraction layer over plain Dockerfiles, and as a task runner for CloudFormation automation. Ansible breaks configuration up into “playbooks…| blog.wilcoxd.com
Introduction In my previous blog article I said: This is the topic of a future blog post: roads and feature capacity of microservice herds. Which will be a much easier conversation to have now that we understand microservices, cliques, herds, products, teams, and how enterprises mash those concepts up in different ways. Before that we need to…| blog.wilcoxd.com