A review by spyralnode
Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems by Sam Newman

5.0

The essential book on microservices. For a technical subject, this is very readable, and does an excellent job at combining approachability in style with precise and well-explained concepts.

Sam Newman is objective in his proposal and identifies both cases when these techniques work and cases where they don’t, and invited the reader to think about potential outcomes from design choices, such as through the CAP theorem. He also discusses the role of the architect and Conway’s law and organisational politics, making this a very complete read.

For me what was especially valuable was how he goes through his train of thought, justifying and criticising step by step what will happen and how this could be improved upon, for example on redundancy strategies and scaling.