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book notes · reading
Building Microservices (2nd edition)
Reading it slowly, chapter by chapter, against the two monolith splits I've already done. Mostly it confirms; occasionally it corrects.
- author
- Sam Newman
- published
- 2021
- pages
- 616
- my rating
- read
- 2026-05-02
- views
key takeaways
- 01Independent deployability is the test. If you can't deploy it alone, it isn't a microservice; it's a distributed monolith.
- 02Start with a modular monolith; extract along seams you can already see in the data.
- 03Choreography scales teams; orchestration is easier to debug. Pick per workflow.
Why I'm reading it
I've split two monoliths (A sub-100ms personalised surge-pricing engine for a US food marketplace and Prompt-to-app BaaS: generating full-stack stores on AWS, then cutting the bill by 76%) by instinct and incident. This is the retrospective: which instincts were right, which were luck.
Notes so far
- Seams: Newman's advice to find seams in the data first matches what worked for me. Pricing split cleanly because its data (profiles, zones) was already separate; notifications split badly at first because they reached into orders.
- Independent deployability is the one-line test I now use in design reviews.
- The chapter on sagas is making me rethink the SLA escalation state machine in Vedico: realtime fleet tracking for telecom field operations as an explicit saga with compensations.
More as I go.
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