For our March meeting we are pleased to announce Microservices vs The Distributed Monolith by Chris Riley. Thanks to our sponsors, Sharpe Recruitment, Campus North, Opia and Better Brand Agency for helping us to put on this months event.

The event will take place at Campus North, Carliol Square, Newcastle Upon Tyne, NE1 6UF (map).

The event is free and open to all, but please sign up online so that we have an idea of numbers for the venue and catering. Feedback, suggestions and ideas for future topics are welcome on Twitter.

Microservices vs The Distributed Monolith by Chris Riley

When faced with a challenging legacy code base, tightly coupled and void of discernible structure: a big ball of mud, it is common to decide to refactor this monolith to a microservice architecture to separate concerns and split the codebase up, however without any clear boundaries you are in danger of creating a distributed big ball of mud.

You may recognise the symptoms of a distributed ball of mud: a large unfocused 'common' library shared between multiple services; performance issues as your front end makes calls to multiple back end API's to serve a single request; dependency hell on deployments as you have to release multiple code bases simultaneously and uptime issues as a single microservice going down brings down your entire application.

In this talk I'm going to cover some of the common pitfalls you might encounter when building a microservice architecture and show you how to use an event driven architecture to build truly scalable microservices.

Chris is a freelance consultant based in York, Uk with experience working in the public sector, small and large companies throughout North Yorkshire. Chris has over 10 years experience with PHP and has a keen focus on both software architecture and none functional requirements such as security, performance and maintainability. In his free time, Chris can often be found producing or playing with experimental libraries and contributing to Zend framework.

After the event, many of us will be going to the Warerooms next door, for some liquid refreshments.