Messaging, distributed systems principles, and horror stories

Join me on a journey of distributed system principles spiced up with a few horror stories of how bad it can go.

We will start by looking at why everyone's favourite request-response style integration is deeply problematic, how messaging can solve many of the issues we're facing and finally how events can play a crucial role in building adaptable loosely coupled services.

Agenda highlights

• What 15 years of implementing distributed system have taught me
  • What's wrong with RPC / Request-Response style integration?
  • How to achieve consistency - aka what's wrong with distributed transactions?

• How micro services solved all problems and turned a local problem into a much worse distributed problem
  • Cascading failures and retry logic
  • Essential complexity vs accidental complexity when integrating using RPC

• CAP theorem & Life beyond distributed transactions
• Introduction to messaging
  • Messaging principles and terminology
  • Message ordering and guarantees
  • Messaging architectures

• Events deep dive
  • Introduction to Event messages
  • Data duplication using Events is a migration pattern, not a permanent solution

• When to choose Request/Response over Messaging
• How to handle the dual write problem?
  • Process Manager/Saga/Outbox pattern/Event Sourcing pattern