This is the first episode of our “What is?” series, where we tackle topics of rising importance in technology and business, more generally speaking. We will tackle, “What is artificial intelligence?,” “What is Blockchain?,” “What is robotics?,” “What is 3d printing?,” and the like. Today, my question is: “What are microservices?” To answer that question, I will speak with a prominent venture capitalist who is investing in this space, and a leading founder/CEO of a business that focuses on microservices.

Matt Miller, Partner at Sequoia

Among other topics, Matt discusses the following issues with Metis Strategy:

* The three requirements for microservices to take off: containers, API, cloud infrastructure

* Advantages of microservices: agility, efficiency, resiliency, and revenue

* Transferring from legacy technology to microservices

* Advice for developing a microservices ecosystem

* Vendor suggestions to assist with migration to container

* How microservices allows you to move from perimeter protection to protecting core individual pieces

* Strategies for staying ahead of the changing tech landscape

* Eye on the trends: monitoring for microservices

Matt is a partner at Sequoia focused on growth stage investments in technology companies. An avid nerd from an early age, Matt started building computers and writing code at 12 years old in his mother’s kitchen. He has worked as an entrepreneur, an advisor and now an investor. At Sequoia, Matt has worked closely with Barracuda Networks, Carbon Black, Confluent, Docker, Hirevue, Nimble Storage, Okta, Simplisafe and SkyHigh Networks. Prior to Sequoia, Matt worked at Goldman Sachs and graduated from Brigham Young University.  In his spare time, Matt is wrangling two young kids with his wife and looking for people with whom he can practice his Swedish.

Jay Kreps, Co-Founder & CEO of Confluent

Among other topics, Jay discusses the following issues with Metis Strategy:

* The origin of Apache Kafka at LinkedIn and its evolution to open source

* Insight into why the precursor to microservices, service oriented architecture, never achieved large scale deployment

* The genesis of Confluent

* Why implementing microservices and Confluent’s products is similar for established companies and start ups

* Suggested strategy and factors necessary for implementing microservices

* The relationship between open source and ecosystems of partners

* Factors that influence the success of Apache Kafka and the Confluent platform

* Confluence’s Exactly Once Delivery/Semantics

Jay Kreps is the co-founder and CEO of Confluent, the company behind the popular Apache Kafka streaming platform. Prior to founding Confluent, he was the lead architect for data infrastructure at LinkedIn. He is among the original authors of several open source projects including Project Voldemort (a key-value store), Apache Kafka (a distributed streaming platform) and Apache Samza (a stream processing system).