Software at Scale 36 - Decomposing Monoliths with Ganesh Datta

Ganesh Datta is the CTO and co-founder of Cortex, a microservice management platform.

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We continue the age-old monolith/microservice debate and dig into why companies seem to like services so much (I’m generally cautious about such migrations). Ganesh has a ton of insights into developer productivity and tooling to make engineering teams successful that we dive into.

Highlights

00:00 - Why solve the service management problem?

06:00 - When to drive a monolith → service migration? What inflection points should one think about to make that decision?

08:30 - What would Ganesh do his next service migration?

10:30 - What tools are useful when migrating to services?

12:00 - Standardizing infrastructure to facilitate migrations. How much to standardize (à la Google), to letting team make their own decisions (à la Amazon)?

17:30 - How does a tool like Cortex help with these problems?

21:30 - How opinionated should such tools be? How much user education is part of building such tools?

27:00 - What are the key cultural components of successful engineering teams?

31:00 - Tactically, what does good service management look like today?

37:00 - What’s the cost/benefit ratio of shipping an on-prem product vs. a SaaS tool?

41:30 - What would your advice be for the next software engineer embarking on their monolith → microservice migration?

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