Sam Newman
Contents
Books in this wiki: Monolith To Microservices
Background
Independent consultant and author specialising in microservices, cloud-native architecture, and software delivery. Best known for Building Microservices (O'Reilly, 2015; 2nd ed. 2021), the canonical reference on microservice architecture, and Monolith to Microservices (O'Reilly, 2019), its practical companion on migration. Worked at ThoughtWorks for many years; has advised organisations globally on service decomposition and delivery practices.
Core Positions
- Independent deployability first: the single most important property of a microservice; everything else — no shared databases, outside-in interface design, loose coupling — is derived from it
- Microservices are not the goal: they are a means to achieve specific business outcomes; adopting them without a clear rationale is a failure mode
- Incremental migration over big-bang rewrite: extract one service at a time, get it to production, learn, adjust; the extraction is not done until it is live
- Domain-driven design as the boundary tool: bounded contexts are the primary unit of decomposition; domain modelling (including Event Storming) is a near-essential first step
- Monolith advantages are real: simpler deployment, developer workflow, and code reuse — microservices are appropriate only when these advantages are outweighed by growth constraints
- Startups should default to monoliths: microservices solve scale-up problems, not startup problems
Books
Monolith To Microservices — Monolith to Microservices (2019)
A practical, opinionated guide to decomposing existing monolithic systems into microservices. Distinguishes itself from general microservices literature by focusing entirely on the migration challenge rather than the target state. Provides a decision framework (three key questions, reversible/irreversible spectrum, two-axis prioritisation quadrant), a taxonomy of monolith types and coupling types, and a preview of the decomposition patterns covered in later chapters (strangler fig, branch by abstraction, database decomposition strategies).