Having worked in and around the software development business for many years, gaining a certain amount of grey hair and experience along the way, I’m often asked to help out teams struggling under the sometimes onerous and dogmatic restrictions of corporate IT. Years of these engagements led to a sort of messianic complex; Me–righteous defender of software craft– locked in epic struggle with evil strictures of enterprise architecture. But lately the tables have turned. Faced with challenges of business reality, regulatory compliance, and organisational complexity, I found myself committing some of the same acts I might have once condemned. This talk gives me an opportunity to confess some of those behaviours, explain why they’re sometimes necessary in a large and complex corporate environment and offer some ways they might be done differently.

Microservices seem to have taken the tech world by storm in recent months. The promise of flexible architectures that evolve and adapt to changing business models is irresistibly attractive. But in the rush to implement these systems, we’ve seen technologists leave some of the stickiest problems to last. Whether you’re decomposing an unwieldily monolith or starting with greenfield delivery, there are certain universal challenges you will eventually encounter. We’ve been building these systems globally for several years now and witnessed the transition from exuberance through despair to sustainable, steady productivity. In this talk, I’ll dive into three of the biggest issues that microservice teams encounter:

• How to secure your microservices
• How to manage aggregated data
• How to refactor your services as you learn about the domain

To illustrate these points, I’ll draw on my own microservice experiences as well as those of friends and colleagues around the world. You’ll walk away with some practical advice for avoiding these common calamities.

Microservices seem to have taken the tech world by storm in recent months. The promise of flexible architectures that evolve and adapt to changing business models is irresistibly attractive. But in the rush to implement these systems, we’ve seen technologists leave some of the stickiest problems to last. Whether you’re decomposing an unwieldily monolith or starting with greenfield delivery, there are certain universal challenges you will eventually encounter. We’ve been building these systems globally for several years now and witnessed the transition from exuberance through despair to sustainable, steady productivity. In this talk, I’ll dive into three of the biggest issues that microservice teams encounter:

• How to secure your microservices
• How to manage aggregated data
• How to refactor your services as you learn about the domain

To illustrate these points, I’ll draw on my own microservice experiences as well as those of friends and colleagues around the world. You’ll walk away with some practical advice for avoiding these common calamities.

Microservices seem to have taken the tech world by storm in recent months. The promise of flexible architectures that evolve and adapt to changing business models is irresistibly attractive. But in the rush to implement these systems, we’ve seen technologists leave some of the stickiest problems to last. Whether you’re decomposing an unwieldily monolith or starting with greenfield delivery, there are certain universal challenges you will eventually encounter. We’ve been building these systems globally for several years now and witnessed the transition from exuberance through despair to sustainable, steady productivity. In this talk, I’ll dive into three of the biggest issues that microservice teams encounter:

• How to secure your microservices
• How to manage aggregated data
• How to refactor your services as you learn about the domain

To illustrate these points, I’ll draw on my own microservice experiences as well as those of friends and colleagues around the world. You’ll walk away with some practical advice for avoiding these common calamities.

Most of the large, traditional, businesses we encounter today feel like their market share is under threat from smaller, more nimble, purely digital competitors. These digital companies are able to continuously experiment and roll out new products and services at an accelerating pace. Even though traditional businesses have the advantage of better customer relationships, more efficient processes and deeper market knowledge, they struggle to become responsive and customer-led. Delivering new features involves scattering change across a complex organisational and IT landscape through laboriously planned and orchestrated programmes of work. In an effort to unlock their existing corporate assets, large organisations are now looking to implement “platforms” that allow them to consolidate and simplify shared capabilities and deliver to customers faster. But what are the characteristics of a good platform?

In this talk, we’ll introduce the concept of a digital platform - a foundation of self-service APIs, tools, services, knowledge and support arranged as compelling internal products. A well-constructed digital platform can accelerate digital product delivery by reducing dependencies and friction between teams and making it easier to access the core business capabilities of your organisation. Using real-world examples, we’ll describe some key characteristics for success, with particular attention to the importance of managing the platform as an internal product.