CAPtivating architecture: Navigating Distributed Systems and Microservices by Alexandros Charos

The goal of this presentation is to go through with the audience the various pitfalls and gotchas that distributed systems entail. We will start with establishing the basics with the CAP theorem an start building from there. The decision to split a new microservice and the trade-offs that need to be considered will be analysed. Given that it has been split, it is important to decide how it should communicate with its peer services (synchronously/asynchronously) and use this a a springboard to introduce the Saga Pattern and its various flavours (sync/async, atomic/eventually consistent, orchestration/choreography) with sample use cases. Finally, we will focus on the importance of timeout configuration, retries, idempotency and circuit-breaking. The goal is to have the above demonstrated with an application and use cases where we focus on as we progress.