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Dear Architect,

Welcome back to our weekly issue!

This week we have in our spotlight a fantastic article for moving a monolithic architecture to microservices with many great ideas and suggestions directly from the great experience of Sam Newman.

I don't know how many architects are aware of Wardley Maps but I can guarantee you it is an incredible asset for taking technology decisions inside your company. This is a free ebook that you can download straight away and learn more about this strategic thinking tool, it's useful for any conversation with the C-Suite and the tech leadership and for taking decisions on "build vs buy" topic.

Finally, I lined up three case studies that I really enjoyed reading. The first one from Netflix talking about the evolution of their customers facing architecture, then Wix and their challenges with huge traffic and how they solved applying different caching strategies, and Shopify sharing how they scale the data platform considering the high volumes traffic of Cyber Mondays and Black Fridays.

Enjoy the read and see you next week!

In the SPOTLIGHT

Software Architecture

Migrating Monoliths to Microservices With Decomposition and Incremental Changes

At QCon London, I spoke about monolith decomposition patterns and how we get to microservices. I like to compare them to nasty jellyfish because they're sort of these tangled entities that also sting us and might kill us. That has a lot in common with the average enterprise microservice migration.

Strategic Thinking

Wardley Maps: the book

This is the story of my journey, from a bumbling and confused CEO lost in the headlights of change to having a vague idea of what I was doing. I say vague because I’m not going to make grand claims to the techniques that I discuss in this book. It is enough to say that I have found them useful over the last decade whether in finding opportunity, removing waste, helping to organise a team of people or determining the strategy for a company.

Case Study

Netflix's Cloud Edge Architecture

The architecture powering the streaming experience was very simple: hardware load balancer, a monolithic webapp, a few web services, and a relational database all running in one data center. That worked well for the thousands of members using streaming at that time. Fast forward to 2021 and Netflix has 200M+ global member households, 1000+ supported devices, and 1000s of original titles

Case Study

4 Microservices Caching Patterns at Wix

Wix has a huge scale of traffic. more than 500 billion HTTP requests and more than 1.5 billion Kafka business events per day. Caching the responses and events is critical for having the best performance and resilience for Wix’s 1500 microservices.

Case Study

How to Reliably Scale Your Data Platform for High Volumes

Black Friday and Cyber Monday—or as we like to call it, BFCM—is one of the largest sales events of the year. It’s also one of the most important moments for Shopify and our merchants. To put it into perspective, this year our merchants across more than 175 countries sold a record breaking $5.1+ billion over the sales weekend. That’s a lot of sales. That’s a lot of data, too.

Thanks for reading Dear Architects 🙏

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Have a great rest of the week 😉

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