Presentation: The Not-So-Straightforward Road From Microservices to Serverless

For the last ten years or so, many companies have focused on migrating from larger, monolithic systems and applications towards a specific style of Service-Oriented Architecture called Microservices. The promise was that these smaller, loosely-coupled, and independently developed components would increase productivity and safety for organizations, as large and complex business challenges can be broken down into smaller and simpler components.

However, even before most organizations were able to fully migrate to this new architecture and enjoy its promised benefits, a new iteration of cloud computing has been made available in the shape of Serverless platforms such as AWS Lambda, and Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure Functions.

Now lots of companies found themselves conflicted between abandoning their traditional microservices approach towards Serverless, often even before they have fully migrated to it from the legacy systems.

After leading successful Microservices adoption at SoundCloud and DigitalOcean, recently at Meetup I have faced the challenge of pivoting from a traditional monolith-to-microservices migration to a cloud-native platform.

In this talk, let's discuss the fundamental concepts, technologies, and practices behind Microservices and Serverless, and how a software architect used to distributed systems based on microservices needs to change their mindset and approach when adopting Serverless.