Software Engineering Daily

The word “microservices” started getting used after a series of events–companies were moving to cloud virtual machines. Those VMs got broken up into containers, and the containers can fit to the size of the service. Services that are more narrowly defined take up smaller containers, and can be packed more densely into the virtual machines–hence the term “microservices.”

As this change to software architecture has occurred, the DevOps movement has encouraged organizations to have better relationships between development and operations. Continuous deployment leads to fewer painful outages. Improved monitoring tools make it easier for developers to take on some of the pain that was previously centralized in operations.

Several months ago, I attended the Microservices Practitioner Summit, which brings together engineers who are working with microservices at their companies. The conference was organized by Austin Gunter and Richard Li of Datawire. In this episode, they joined me for a conversation about microservices.

Software Engineering Daily is having our third Meetup, Wednesday May 3rd at Galvanize in San Francisco. The theme of this Meetup is Fraud and Risk in Software. We will have great food, engaging speakers, and a friendly, intellectual atmosphere. To find out more, go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/meetup.

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Search is a common building block for applications. Whether we are searching Wikipedia or our log files, the behavior is similar: a query is entered and the most relevant documents are returned. The core data structure for search is an inverted index. Elasticsearch is a scalable, resilient search tool that shards and replicates a search index.

Philipp Krenn from Elastic joins the show today to discuss how search works and how Elasticsearch scales. We use Wikipedia as a running example for how a query is processed and how documents are stored.

If you’ve ever wondered how search works–or if your company uses Elasticsearch and you want to know more about it–this is a great episode for you.

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There are various standards at play when creating and consuming Application Program Interfaces (APIs).  These standards, though, are mostly technical and mostly lower-level than the content of the API.

Andy Beier has experienced the broad range of API quality in his role with Domo in creating integrations with other businesses.  He has made standardization of good practices in creating APIs his mission, with an emphasis on making the right information easily accessible without having to download more than necessary.  He has traveled to meet with leaders in the field to promote standards and to make APIs easier to create and to consume.

In this episode, Andy joins Dave Rael for a conversation about API design standards, what makes for a good API, and steps in moving the broader technical community toward more useful and secure APIs.

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Servers in a data center fail. Sometimes entire data centers have a power outage. Bugs in an application make it into production. Human operators make mistakes and cause data to be deleted.

Failure is unavoidable. We make backups and replicate our servers so that when a failure occurs, we can quickly respond to it without making the user feel much pain. But how can we test that our response will work before an actual catastrophe occurs?

Kolton Andrus is CEO of Gremlin, a company that works on failure injection as a service. Gremlin is based on ideas around planned failure that Kolton learned from his years at Amazon and Netflix.

We ended up talking as much about the culture of Netflix and Amazon as we did about how and why to build failure injection. It’s always nice to share war stories with other people who have worked at Amazon because the culture is so distinct. If you want to know more about Amazon’s culture, check out the episode tomorrow with Brad Stone, author of The Everything Store.

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Designers and software engineers need to communicate with each other. From Apple to Slack to Uber, the emphasis on visual design within a product is rising in importance. Much like development and operations siloes have been bridged with the DevOps movement, design and engineering teams are working more closely together to align the vision of the designers with the realities of code.

InVision is a product for prototyping designs and product workflows. I categorize InVision with high-level productivity tools like Trello, Asana, and github. When teams start using InVision, it often becomes an integral part of the entire product workflow. A designer will mock up their product vision on InVision and share it with the rest of the team for criticism and commentary.

Since the product is the perfect bridge between engineers and designers, InVision the company is expanding as a platform. Bjorn Freeman-Benson is the CTO at InVision and his task is to scale the 100% remote engineering team while developing new product features.

Bjorn describes himself as a software psychologist. We talked about the psychology of managing engineers and the technical challenges of building a large, popular web app for technology products.

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