“There’s an upcoming battle between what we see with microservices nowadays and the role of serverless”

Integrating microservices and taming distributed systems is hard. In his talk at JAX London 2018, Bernd Rücker, developer advocate & co-founder of Camunda presented three challenges the company observed in real-life projects and discuss how to avoid them.

1. Communication is complex. With everything being distributed failures are normal so you need sophisticated failure handling strategies (e.g. stateful retry).
2. Asynchronicity requires you to handle timeouts. This is not only about milliseconds, systems get much more resilient when you can wait for minutes, hours or even longer.
3. Distributed transactions cannot simply be delegated to protocols like XA. So you need to solve the requirement to retain consistency in case of failures.

JAXenter assistant editor Eirini-Eleni Papadopoulou caught up with Bernd to discuss some common pitfalls in microservice integration and how to avoid them, the top drivers for adopting microservices, the expanding universe of microservices and more.

Here are some quotes from the interview:

We are binding together a lot of teams and they have to do a joint release. They have to communicate a lot in order to get something in production. It’s very obvious that it slows you down and the risk of falling down is much slower.
As the microservices adoption rises, I see new challenges coming up.
Traditional companies have a long way to go; they are still at the very beginning of microservices, many clients are just making their first steps
The microservices adoption is quite scattered.
We are starting new journeys like serverless, which I personally believe will be a huge thing but it needs a few years to get traction.
The lack of tools is a huge pain in the serverless world but this problem will be solved a couple of years down the road.

Bernd Rücker is a developer advocate & co-founder of Camunda. Throughout his 15+ years in software development, he has helped to automate highly scalable core workflows at global companies including T-Mobile, Lufthansa and Zalando. He has contributed to various open source workflow engines. Bernd co-authored “Real-Life BPMN,” a popular book about workflow modeling and automation and he regularly speaks at conferences and writes for various magazines. He is currently focused on new workflow automation paradigms that fit into modern architectures around distributed systems, microservices, domain-driven design, event-driven architecture and reactive systems.