Microservices allow engineering teams to move quickly to grow a product… assuming they don’t get bogged down by the complexity of operating a distributed system. In this post, I’ll show you how some of the hardest operational problems in microservices—staging and canarying of deep services—can be solved by introducing the notion of routing to the RPC layer.
Looking back at my time as an infrastructure engineer at Twitter (from 2010 to 2015), I now realize that we were “doing microservices”, though we didn’t have that vocabulary at the time. (We used what I now understand to be a bad word—SOA).
Buzzwords aside, our motivations were the same as those doing microservices today. We needed to allow engineering teams to operate independently—to control their own deploy schedules, on call rotations, availability, and scale. These teams needed the flexibility to iterate and scale quickly and independently—without taking down the site.
Read more at Buoyant Blog
