Sam Newman Quotes & Sayings

If there is too much sharing, our consuming services become coupled to our internal representations. This decreases our autonomy, — Sam Newman

Zookeeper itself is fairly generic in what it offers, which is why it is used for so many use cases. You can think of it just as a replicated tree of information that you can be alerted about when it changes. This means that you'll typically build things on top of it to suit your particular use case. Luckily, client libraries exist for most languages out there. — Sam Newman

Gather together those things that change for the same reason, and separate those things that change for different reasons. — Sam Newman

I get asked this question a lot. My first piece of advice would be that the less well you understand a domain, the harder it will be for you to find proper bounded contexts for your services. As we discussed previously, getting service boundaries wrong can result in having to make lots of changes in service-to-service collaboration - an expensive operation. So if you're coming to a monolithic system for which you don't understand the domain, spend some time learning what the system does first, and then look to identify clean module boundaries prior to splitting out services. — Sam Newman

if bridge building were like programming, halfway through we'd find out that the far bank was now 50 meters farther out, that it was actually mud rather than granite, and that rather than building a footbridge we were instead building a road bridge. — Sam Newman

You should assume that your networks are plagued with malevolent entities ready to unleash their ire on a whim. — Sam Newman

using this approach, which it then open sourced as the Aegisthus project — Sam Newman

Most CMSes are pretty bad even at doing page layout, typically providing drag-and-drop tools that don't cut the mustard. And even then, you end up needing to have someone who understands HTML and CSS to fine-tune the CMS templates. They tend to be terrible platforms on which to build custom code. — Sam Newman

You'll often see posts about people beating the CAP theorem. They haven't. What they have done is create a system where some capabilities are CP, and some are AP. The mathematical proof behind the CAP theorem holds. Despite many attempts at school, I've learned that you don't beat math. — Sam Newman

When we compare ourselves to engineers or architects, we are in danger of doing everyone a disservice. — Sam Newman

Avoid database integration at all costs. Understand the trade-offs between REST and RPC, but strongly consider REST as a good starting point for request/response integration. Prefer choreography over orchestration. Avoid breaking changes and the need to version by understanding Postel's Law and using tolerant readers. — Sam Newman

Two different pieces of technology, Swagger and HAL, try to make this a reality, and both are worth looking at. — Sam Newman

our architects need to shift their thinking away from creating the perfect end product, and instead focus on helping create a framework in which the right systems can emerge, and continue to grow as we learn more. — Sam Newman

Gateway layers tend to take on more and more functionality, which itself can end up being a giant coupling point. And the more functionality something has, the greater the attack surface — Sam Newman

Services should also hide their databases to avoid falling into one of the most common sorts of coupling that can appear in traditional service-oriented architectures, and use data pumps or event data pumps to consolidate data across multiple services for reporting purposes. — Sam Newman

Principles Principles are rules you have made in order to align what you are doing to some larger goal, and will sometimes change. For example, if one of your strategic goals as an organization is to decrease the time to market for new features, you may define a principle that says that delivery teams have full control over the lifecycle of their software to ship whenever they are ready, independently of any other team. If another goal is that your organization is moving to aggressively grow its offering in other countries, you may decide to implement a principle that the entire system must be portable to allow for it to be deployed locally in order to respect sovereignty of data. You probably don't want loads of these. Fewer than 10 is a good number - small enough that people can remember them, or to fit on small posters. The more principles you have, the greater the chance that they overlap or contradict each other. — Sam Newman