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rodhilton's review against another edition
3.0
I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did. I see Microservices as a "fad" that's picking up a lot of steam, and I work with microservices but want to know how to be more effective building them. The notion of a book entirely devoted to discussing how to make your microservices production-ready was very appealing.
However, like many other reviews of this book, I found it to be far too high-level to be very useful. Almost every section makes the reader think "that's really interesting, I'd like a little more detail on that" only to have the subject change for the next section. You never get that detail you're craving, and it's very unsatisfying. In fact, I don't think there's almost any part of the book where an engineer could read it and then come away thinking about what to do next to improve their microservices. The only "next step" after reading anything is to read something else. The only exception to this is the Documentation section, which actually provides a fairly decent template for writing microservice documention, because documentation is so high-level that a high-level discussion of it actually felt appropriate.
The author states "each section of each of the chapters within this book could be expanded into its own book" as a way of basically dismissing the idea of incorporating direct useful details into this book. And yet, Eberhard Wolff's "Microservices" does exactly that - containing almost all of the information in this book, PLUS all the details you'd need to actually incorporate the information from the book into your microservices, and it clocks in at 395 pages, a mere 2.5x this book's 153 pages. Why would you ever bother reading this one?
The answer is, you wouldn't. At least, not as an engineer. Susan Fowler's "Production-Ready Microservices" isn't a book for engineers. Wolff's book is for engineers. "Production-Ready Microservices" is for managers. If your engineer team has found itself building microservices (or, as is increasingly common, told to build microservices by management because it's en vogue), but you need to do something to convince management that you need to put more time into this or that aspect of your microservice architecture to make it production-ready, hand your manager a copy of this book. It's only 153 pages, and it even contains checklists. You can point directly at the checklist and say "look, we're not doing this, that, or this - we're not ready for production yet" and it looks official enough because it's in a book. It's an effective tool in this regard, I think.
Otherwise, the book kind of feels like a consultant coming in and looking at your microservice architecure and poo-pooing it, just being judgemental about what you're building or you've built. "Nope, you're not doing these three things on my checklist, this isn't production ready." Oh, okay. So, do you have any concrete suggestions for how to fix this? "Look, that'd be an entirely different book okay? I don't have time to tell you that, I just want you to know that I know what you've built isn't good." Oh. Alright well, thanks for nothing.
The checklists are indeed super handy, I can easily see referencing them when discussing production readiness with co-workers. But aside from that, this is a book I'd give a manager to help them understand the architectural situation, but otherwise never really reference myself. For engineers, I'd definitely recommend Wolff's "Microservices" over this book.
However, like many other reviews of this book, I found it to be far too high-level to be very useful. Almost every section makes the reader think "that's really interesting, I'd like a little more detail on that" only to have the subject change for the next section. You never get that detail you're craving, and it's very unsatisfying. In fact, I don't think there's almost any part of the book where an engineer could read it and then come away thinking about what to do next to improve their microservices. The only "next step" after reading anything is to read something else. The only exception to this is the Documentation section, which actually provides a fairly decent template for writing microservice documention, because documentation is so high-level that a high-level discussion of it actually felt appropriate.
The author states "each section of each of the chapters within this book could be expanded into its own book" as a way of basically dismissing the idea of incorporating direct useful details into this book. And yet, Eberhard Wolff's "Microservices" does exactly that - containing almost all of the information in this book, PLUS all the details you'd need to actually incorporate the information from the book into your microservices, and it clocks in at 395 pages, a mere 2.5x this book's 153 pages. Why would you ever bother reading this one?
The answer is, you wouldn't. At least, not as an engineer. Susan Fowler's "Production-Ready Microservices" isn't a book for engineers. Wolff's book is for engineers. "Production-Ready Microservices" is for managers. If your engineer team has found itself building microservices (or, as is increasingly common, told to build microservices by management because it's en vogue), but you need to do something to convince management that you need to put more time into this or that aspect of your microservice architecture to make it production-ready, hand your manager a copy of this book. It's only 153 pages, and it even contains checklists. You can point directly at the checklist and say "look, we're not doing this, that, or this - we're not ready for production yet" and it looks official enough because it's in a book. It's an effective tool in this regard, I think.
Otherwise, the book kind of feels like a consultant coming in and looking at your microservice architecure and poo-pooing it, just being judgemental about what you're building or you've built. "Nope, you're not doing these three things on my checklist, this isn't production ready." Oh, okay. So, do you have any concrete suggestions for how to fix this? "Look, that'd be an entirely different book okay? I don't have time to tell you that, I just want you to know that I know what you've built isn't good." Oh. Alright well, thanks for nothing.
The checklists are indeed super handy, I can easily see referencing them when discussing production readiness with co-workers. But aside from that, this is a book I'd give a manager to help them understand the architectural situation, but otherwise never really reference myself. For engineers, I'd definitely recommend Wolff's "Microservices" over this book.
trnl's review against another edition
4.0
Good overview on the micro service architectures from operational point of view.
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