Wednesday 

Room 8 

11:40 - 12:40 

(UTC+02

Talk (60 min)

You Keep Using That Word: Asynchronous And Interprocess Comms

When it comes to distributed computing, one of the perennial topics comes down to how different services should communicate. Working out the relative merits of specific technical approaches can become a complex affair however, so we often reach for categorisation to simplify our work. Often, the discussion around inter-process communication hinges on what on the face of it seems to be a simple decision: Synchronous or Asynchronous.

Microservices
Architecture
DevOps

Unfortunately, it turns out that this is far from a simple assessment of what approach is best. Aside from many nuances around this topic, the main issue is that it seems that people can’t even agree on what asynchronous means! Is it non-blocking clients? Message-broker based communication? Does only inbox-based message passing apply?

In this talk, we’ll explore the meaning of asynchronous in the context of distributed systems, and show that using the same word in ever-so slightly different contexts causes a huge amount of confusion.

Sam Newman

Sam Newman is interested in technology at the intersection of things, from development, to ops, to security, usability and organisations. After over a decade at ThoughtWorks he is now an independent consultant. Sam is the author of "Building Microservices" from O'Reilly. He has worked with a variety of companies in multiple domains around the world, often with one foot in the developer world, and another in the IT operations space. If you asked him what he does, he’d say ‘I work with people to build better software systems’. He has written articles, presented at conferences, and sporadically commits to open source projects. While Java used to be his bread and butter, he also spends time with Ruby, Python, Javascript, and Clojure, Infrastructure Automation and Cloud systems.