Just over a year ago (before becoming the full time chair and advocate of QCon London, San Francisco, and New York), my main role was with HPE as the principal architect for the US Army’s Cadet Command.

The systems we supported were responsible for personnel information, scholarships, and record management for soldiers becoming officers in the US Army. Like so many others, we were also faced with legacy applications, COTS (GOTS) product integrations, polyglot code bases, and often brittle deployments. In an effort to decouple code bases and address some of these issues, we started advocating for a Microservice architecture and trying to distinguish it from the SOA practices of the past.

Now, it’s a year later. I have had the incredible opportunity to have access to architects, engineers, and leaders from some of the world’s more respected software companies. These are companies like Uber, Microsoft, Netflix, Apple, Google, Slack, Pinterest, and Etsy. I’ve had the chance to have one-on-one discussions with Chief Architects, developers, and engineers building the apps I most admire and use every day (some leveraging Microservices, some embracing Monoliths, and others falling somewhere in between).

Patterns & Practices of Microservices is everything I wish I knew before beginning a push towards Microservices just over a year ago. It’s the practices of companies leveraging Microservices, it’s the technology tradeoffs when deciding between Monoliths and Microservices, and it’s the advice I’ve heard in interviewing, podcasting, and iterating on presentations from software giants like Adrian Cockcroft, Matt Ranney, Josh Evans, Martin Thompson, and literally hundreds of other engineers who drop knowledge at QCons around the world.