Building resilient systems with Sam Newman

Gergely Orosz (0:00)

Sam Newman is the author who wrote probably the most widely read book on microservices. And yet, as you heard, he said that microservices are an architecture of the last resort. But why?

Sam was in the room when the term microservices was coined.

I find him to be one of the most thoughtful engineers on this topic, as well as on resilient systems. And his latest book, Building Resilient Distributed Systems is out now. Today, we cover Specs vs Code as a Source of Truth and Why Sam Says That Production is Truth, Item Potency Keys vs Fingerprints and Why You Should Avoid Item Potency Keys When Possible, The Four Dimensions of Resilience, Robustness, Rebound, Graceful Extensibility and Sustainability, Cognitive Depth and Cognitive Surrender and Sam's Advice on How to Better Use AI to Avoid These and many more. If you want to understand what it takes to build resilient systems, from an expert who has been knee-dependent on this topic for 10 plus years, this episode is for you.

This episode is presented by TurboBuffer, the AI retrieval layer built on object storage. It's fast, cheap and extremely scalable. Andropic, Cognition, Notion and many others are happy customers. Before we start, let me mention Tire, our season's sponsor and our product and team I'm very bullish on. You probably already know that Git hosting has a problem, AI agents. Git is increasingly becoming a bottleneck for modern agent-heavy software development. Engines like you and me are creating more code with agents, those agents push more code, and most of us are running parallel agents, which push way more code. GitHub is clearly starting to keep up and has frequent outages. So what's the solution? Tire was founded by GitHub's last CEO, Thomas Dumke, who by the way was a guest on a podcast when he was still at GitHub, and Thomas revealed Git hosting for the agentic era from scratch. Tire was built to be very fast and to have your repos regionally close to you to reduce latency, and this allows for fleets of agents to push in parallel. And Tire's performance is next level. Their repo can handle 418 pushes per second, which is up to 89 times faster than every competitor on the market. When GitHub is down, you can still keep working, and you don't even need to migrate away from GitHub. You just sign up to Tire and the platform mirrors your repo. And here's a neat thing. Have you ever wondered what prompt resulted in this specific code being generated? I find that the prompt and conversation with the agent carries more information than the PR itself oftentimes. Tire captures all the prompt history with your agent, right inside of the repo, easy to check back. And it's got a pretty innovative UI to show all of this. If you're looking for Git hosting that works even when GitHub is down, head to entire.io/pragmatic, install the CLI and mirror your repo with a click. I've already done it and I love it. Oh, and did I mention that it works with any agent and it's open source?

Sam, it's great to have you on the podcast.

Sam Newman (2:36)

Thank you so much for having me. I'm happy to be here, really happy to be here. Big fan of the show, as they say. I'm not going to lie, I've become a bit of a millennial and I think I watch a lot of shorts rather than watching the whole things now. I'm becoming my son.

Gergely Orosz (2:48)

Yeah, millennial is a new boomer, apparently, I've learned.

Sam Newman (2:51)

Oh, God. I was happy enough being Gen Y, now I'm wherever I am now.

Gergely Orosz (2:55)

Well, so let's go back to the beginning. You've been known for a lot of your books, your takes on Resilient Systems, Microservices. Before that, you worked at ThoughtWorks, but let's go into the very beginning. How did you get interested in tech and computers?

Sam Newman (3:08)

I'm quite fortunate. Living in the UK, we had places and access to computers quite early on. We had an Acorn Electron at home, which was sort of one of the generations of the BBC computers that came after the BBC B.

And then I got a Spectrum 1283, which is the Spectrum that had the built-in tape drive.

Gergely Orosz (3:27)

This is way before the Commodores.

Sam Newman (3:29)

I think some of this was the... I think I'm pretty sure that the Acorn Electron was pre-Commodore, but the Spectrum would have been around the same time. The UK was a bit more of a Spectrum and BBC market, whereas the US, the Commodores and the Ataris and things were a bit bigger. So that sort of got me a bit interested. And then I always sort of stayed interested in it. That had a computer. I did the very boring thing. I went to uni. I did a software engineering degree at a place called De Montfort University, which the running joke in my family is it's the... in the top five universities in the Leicester area. There are only two universities in Leicester.