Capturing Patterns

Posted on Apr 8 2015

While writing and presenting about microservices for the last few years, I realised I was seeing the same set of solutions (or problems) come up over and over again. While I was writing the book, I gave some of these reoccuring ideas names, but stopped short of calling them out as patterns in their own right. Increasingly however I realised that I needed some canonical references to the terms I have been using, and so the time was right to start writing up some of the patterns I have seen.

I already have a blog here at the site (you're reading it!), but a pattern and a blog post feel like very different things. A blog post is typically of it's moment. I tend not to go back and change a blog post unless there is a need for clarification, to fix a spelling mistake or because I got something very wrong. However the discussion and evolution of a pattern is a very live thing, and I wanted a cannonical URI that I could use to point people to these ideas.

This means that I'm going to be capturing the patterns on this website as a stand-alone place. I will revisit them, update them with examples and change them as I get feedback. I'm also terrible at naming things, so I suspect a few renames will occur too. One thing I do need to resolve is how to make people aware when there are changes to existing patterns. An ATOM feed which updates only when a new pattern is created is going to miss changes I make to existing patterns, but I also probably don't want the feed to spam everyone whenever I make a minor spelling correction. I'll have to think on that some more.

For the first batch of patterns I've written up a few different service ownership models. The Roving Custodian , Open Service Ownership and Temporary Service Ownership patterns cover off different ways of handling making changes to services that may not be owned by any one team, all of which can be useful when dealing with an Orphaned Service . I have a healthy backlog of other patterns to cover off on a range of topics including backlog management, security, and deployment models. Hopefully it'll keep me busy for the next few months!