Welcome!
I want to say thank you so much for signing up to receive updates from me. This is the first of what I plan to be monthly updates keeping you abreast of how progress is going on my latest book, Building Distributed Resilient Systems, and anything else I might be working on.
Current Book Status
Along with the preface, three chapters of Building Resilient Distributed Systems are available in an early access form at O’Reilly.com. These chapters include the introductory chapter, a chapter on timeouts, and another on retries and idempotency. I plan to push new draft chapters out via early access every couple of months.
To read the early access version of the book, you will need an account with O'Reilly. You can though sign up for a free ten day trial.
Based on the current plan (which is very much fluid!), I’m hoping to have a first draft complete in Q2 next year, with the book published in Q3 2025.
The table of contents (which you can see here) is a bit more fluid than my previous books - this is largely down to the fact that whilst I am pretty certain about what I want in the book, I am constantly reassessing how best to actually present it. As an example, the timeout, retries, and rate limiting content was originally planned to be in a single chapter.
Tech reviewers have been working hard reviewing the chapter on rate limiting, which will get pushed to early access in the next few weeks once I’ve had a chance to go over their comments. Following that, I have a rather large and problematic chapter I’ve been working on which (ironically enough) looks at how systems deal with having too much work to do. Tentatively structured around the concept of the thundering herd, it’s turned into a bit of a beast so I’m not entirely sure what either my editors or tech reviewers will make of it! Expect both the rate limiting and thundering herd chapters to be available in early access during September.
Things I’ve Been Reading
I'm doing a lot of research for Building Resilient Distributed Systems, so I thought I’d share a few things I read recently that have had me especially engaged over the past few weeks.
The Saddest Moment (pdf). I love a bit of well directed snark, and James Mickens’ take on byzantine consensus protocols had me howling (in a good way). Here is a sample:
“…we cling to Byzantine fault tolerance like Charlton Heston clings to his guns, hoping that a series of complex software protocols will somehow protect us from the oncoming storm of furious apes who have somehow learned how to wear pants and maliciously tamper with our network packets.”
It’s good stuff.
CMS Management Of The Federal Marketplace. Yes this is very much on the drier end of the spectrum, yes it’s 92 pages long, and no I haven’t read all of it (and I’ll be honest, I don’t plan to). But after reading a lot of commentary of the problematic rollout of Healthcare.gov’s marketplace, I wanted to go as close to a balanced, factual assessment as I could.
Tracking On Call Health. In many situations people being on call is a necessary evil, but it’s not always handled well, and I wanted to cover this topic in some form. It’s been a LONG time since I was officially on call though, so I’m having to live vicariously through others. This is a nice writeup from Fred Hebert which details how Honeycomb track on call health as of May 2022. I plan to follow up with Honeycomb directly to see if this has evolved subsequently. This blog post also led me to the work of Erik Hollnagel on analysing resilience, which will likely feature in a forthcoming post, once I’ve had a chance to digest it all.
Upcoming Events
Q3 is typically one of the busiest times of year for me, but due to prioritising the new book I have cut back a bit. NDC Porto and the Trifork Masterclass in Amsterdam will be the last time I run my two day microservices workshop at a public event for the foreseeable future, although I will still be offering this to private clients.
- IT Arena, Ukraine. I’m excited to be able to return to Ukraine for my third visit, albeit my previous two trips were to Kyiv before the invasion. I’ll be delivering a talk about the nature of asynchronous communication, hopefully along with some other things yet to be confirmed.
- NDC Porto 14-18th October. I’ll be running my two day microservices workshop on the 14th & 15th, and also be speaking later in the event. The NDC conferences are always well run (with excellent food!). You can buy tickets for the workshop and conference separately.
- Trifork Academy in Amsterdam, 26-27th November. This is a two day microservices masterclass, with tickets available now. I do have a cap in the number of attendees for this class, so make sure to sign up now to guarantee your spot.
- Tech.Rocks Summit in Paris 2-3rd December. I’ll be delivering the opening keynote, on the topic of resilience.
Working With Me
Writing is a lot of what I do, but it’s not the only thing I do. I also provide consulting to organisations looking for help with tech strategy and architecture (especially as it relates to cloud, microservices and continuous delivery). I also can deliver tailored in-house training and presentations on a variety of topics. If you want to know more, then drop me a line on contact@samnewman.io.
That’s it from me! Fingers crossed that October’s edition of the newsletter will come with the news that at least one and perhaps two new chapters of the book will be available for you to read via O'Reilly.
Sam
