Developing Services

Abstract

Netflix has taken three steps to build an anti-fragile organization. The first step is to treat every developer as an operator of the corresponding service. The second is to treat each failure as an opportunity to learn and the third is to foster a blameless culture. These three little steps have helped Netflix become the top-leading organization in the microservices world. Many look to Netflix to learn how things are being done and for best practices. Netflix in fact optimized everything for the speed of delivery. As we already discussed in the book, at its core of any microservices design, time to production, scalability, complexity localization, and resiliency are key elements. Developer experience is one of the most important factors to reach these goals. The experience of a developer in a microservices environment is quite different from engineering a monolithic application. As rightly identified by Netflix, the developer’s task does not end after pushing the code into a source repository and expecting a DevOps engineer to build and push the changes to production, or a support engineer to take on any issues that happen in the production environment. A microservices development environment demands a broader skillset from the developer.