Building resilient systems with Sam Newman

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Sam Newman wrote one of the most-read books about microservices (“Building Microservices”), but he calls them an architecture of “last resort.”

In this episode of the Pragmatic Engineer podcast, Sam explains his thinking on this, and he’s certainly well placed to do so; he was in the room when the term “microservices” was coined. We discuss what teams get wrong when adopting microservices, why independent deployment matters, and how microservices can help teams work more autonomously.

We also delve into his new book, ‘Building Resilient Distributed Systems’, and Sam explains his three rules for distributed systems, why observability is essential, and also why it’s vital to take business context into account when deciding whether to fail open or fail closed on errors.

We also explore how AI is changing software development, from specs versus code as a source of truth to cognitive debt and cognitive surrender. Sam shares how modular architecture can help teams experiment with AI while maintaining understanding of the systems being built.

Timestamps

00:00 Intro

03:16 Sam’s path into tech