The Other Kind of Distributed System

Last week, our Chief Architect, Rafael Schloming, presented at the Node.js Meetup in Boston on The Other Kind of Distributed System.

The talk covers the intersection between distributed systems and distributed development. Developers are already used to thinking about the challenges of dividing a single large task into many smaller tasks – something we often call distributed computation or distributed systems. Today, though, the challenge of dividing development into many smaller pieces is arguably more critical, for example, divvying work amongst distributed teams.

The intersection of distributed computing and distributed development is what is new and hard about microservices. Although we understand distributed computation and distributed development very well, as an industry we are still exploring best practices about what happens when the two intersect. This talk addresses the challenges of distributed development and how organizations can think about practical solutions as they adopt microservices and deliver better software, faster.

Ambassador Labs has been speaking with a number of companies who are addressing this challenge of effectively using microservices in their organizations to develop tooling so that they can take advantage of microservices without needing to build their own architecture from scratch. We’ll have more on what we’re putting together very soon.