Pini Reznik - Cloud Native Transformation: Practical Patterns for Innovation

by Pini Reznik, Jamie Dobson, and Michelle Gienow

Copyright 2020 Pini Reznik, Jamie Dobson, and Michelle Gienow. All rights reserved.

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978-1-492-04890-9

[LSI]

A few years ago, I was in Amsterdam for Dockercon Europe and met a very enthusiastic British guy with a northern accent, Jamie Dobson. He seemed to be running a company in Holland, but it wasnt at all clear what they did. A bit later that company became Container Solutions and expanded to London, and I kept running into Jamie, Pini Reznik, and Adrian Mouat (and eventually Anne Currie) at other conferences. Then the Container Solutions crew came up with this crazy idea to run a conference in a dockside warehouse in Amsterdam, one that mixed software with a kind of Burning Man vibe. It was called Software Circus.

Outside there was a 30-foot-tall fire-breathing robot called Kevin and a whole pig roasted on a spit for lunch. I was the opening keynote speaker, although I had no idea who would come and what they would want to hear about. Over 400 people turned up, and I improvised the talk with no slides, told stories, got suggestions from the audience, and the projected Twitter feed became an effective crowdsourced substitute for a presentation. Afterward, Kelsey Hightower, who was giving the keynote on the second day, told me he hadnt ever previously thought of doing a talk with no slides, but he was now inspired to have a go. Kelsey then famously gave an entire talk on container scheduling while displaying himself playing Tetris. It was one of the more memorable conferences Ive attended, but there were no videos of the talks; you had to have been there!

The people at Container Solutions think differently, dont play it safe, and seem to have a lot of fun along the way. Theyve worked on some very interesting projects over the years, and this is an unusual book; its a collection of stories and a pattern library. The stories are entertaining and illustrate the same common patterns Ive seen around the world, as companies struggle to adopt DevOps, product-based teams, microservices, continuous delivery, containers, and serverless. The pattern library is best approached as a cross-indexed random access collection. You could do a linear full table scan by reading it through, but its better to pick an interesting starting point and walk the graph by following the cross-references to related patterns. The individual patterns contain a lot of great detailed advice and arent afraid to be opinionated. I agree with most of the opinions and find that they reflect the real-world experience that is often written out of books that play it safe with generic answers.

From my experience Id like to provide three core ideas that this book illustrates in detail. First, most of the customers I meet think they have a technology adoption problem, when in reality they have an org-chart problem. The most successful orgs are made up of many small independent business teams communicating via clear APIs. If thats your org chart, you will inevitably build a microservices architecture, a trick known as the Reverse Conway Maneuver.

Second, the single most important metric for executives to focus on is time-to-value, which can be instrumented most easily as committing to deploy latency for each team. Many companies cant innovate because they cant get out of their own way, and short time-to-value (target less than a day) releases pent-up innovation from your teams. Third, there is far too much time spent in analysis paralysis, discussing technology variations and arguing about how best to architect solutions.