Particular Software Blog

If you're using .NET I have to plug https://particular.net/ Nservicebus from particular.net. It's great at abstracting away the underlying message broker and provides an opinionated way to build a distributed system.

While not a book: I took Udi Dahan's Advanced distributed systems design course in 2018 and can't recommend it enough: https://particular.net/adsd I'm pretty sure there is an online course available which you can watch, so it's a slightly different medium but may be a nice change of pace from reading. The course was really informative for me and has really been paying dividends in my career.

I'm a C#/MVC developer working on a fairly large e-commerce site. It's a distributed system using message based microservices tied together using https://particular.net/nservicebus. There is also http://masstransit.readthedocs.io/en/master/ Some great tooling Visual Studio, Octopus Deploy, red gate SQL source control etc C#/F# - The languages are very nice. Huge inbuilt library. C# is probably one of the best statically typed, OO languages there is. For functional languages you have F#, C#/F# is starting to run on many platforms including iOS/Android/Linux etc See Xamarin The .NET platform is the home of CQRS and event sourcing if you want MASSIVE scale.

Udi Dahan's "Learn Advanced Distributed Systems Design" course. https://particular.net/adsd At one point, I was considering paying out of pocket to attend the course. Fortunately, the company I was working for at the time wanted to send people to it and I got selected. After taking the course, even if I did have to pay myself, I wouldn't have been upset. That course is outstanding.

We don't call it an ESB in our non-Enterprise environment. It's just called "service bus" or "message bus". Which is really just a fancy application-level API around services, queues, and messages (see http://particular.net/NServiceBus). It's incredibly useful, dare I say essential, for abstracting away those infrastructure level concerns when developing complex distributed applications. We use it pretty extensively in our SaaS product to achieve loose coupling, yet high cohesion, between our various software components.

> Why do people still believe that preventing civilians from using encryption is going to stop criminals? Is there a name for this fallacy? After a quick search i found the base rate fallacy which maybe could be applicable (no idea if it is really). > If presented with related base rate information (i.e. generic, general information) and specific information (information pertaining only to a certain case), the mind tends to ignore the former and focus on the latter. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy There's also the general fallacy around security (a non technical term I've made up on the spot): > The only truly secure computer is one that is disconnected from any and all networks, turned off, buried in the ground, and encased in concrete. But that computer isn't terribly useful. Kinda applies to both parties of the argument because there's often an idea behind both that there is such a thing as "perfect security". https://particular.net/blog/the-network-is-secure Theres also possibly some agenda bias going on. -------- > What does Zoom’s premium subscription offer? Jitsi supports unlimited participants and runtime for free, and soon E2E encryption. The biggest thing around this is to remember that >90% of users are not tech nerds: * The Jitsi webclient isn't the nicest UI and a nice UI is really important for non-nerds. * Jitsi Dial in options are a bit limited (from what I remember, could be wrong). Zoom offers a package for toll-free dial in…

Like others have mentioned here, simply pointing out examples where microservices have failed doesn't imply that microservices can't succeed. I've attempted to bake bread twice and they both failed. I didn't conclude that baking bread can't be done, but that my skills to do it were insufficient. There are lots of examples of successful companies using microservices, but I believe the real problem is in defining what constitutes a microservice. Most people call things "microservices" that are nothing of the sort. I can unequivocally say if you built a "service" that depends on other things being 100% available (like another "service") than you haven't built a microservice (ie: those things you built shouldn't be called services). By that token, autonomy is a pretty important factor. The Udi Dahan teachings (https://particular.net/adsd) (currently available for free) promote this style of architecture. A concrete example of a toolkit for building true microservices can be found in Message DB (https://github.com/message-db/message-db) and/or Eventide (http://docs.eventide-project.org/) I wouldn't suggest, however, that anyone can just watch the course, pick up these tools and succeed. Like baking a good loaf of bread, it takes a lot of skill, work and experience. Whether or not you succeed at building microservices is ultimately up to you and your team.