µCon: The Microservices eXchange ran 13-14 April 2021.
Over two community-focused days, attendees from around the globe connected with experts and likeminded developers to share challenges and discover how other teams have adopted microservices.
Since 2014 µCon has been the go‑to conference for vendor‑neutral conversations about Microservices, and once again you'll have the chance to learn from leading experts of the Microservices world.

This year’s µCon: The Microservices eXchange was an online conference.
µCon featured two day of expert-led talks plus breakout spaces for getting to know your fellow developers.
At Skills Matter, we’ve chosen to see the events of the past year as a challenge to make our content and community more inclusive and accessible to all. Beyond the current COVID‑19 pandemic, we have a vision of a community where knowledge sharing and skills transfer are not limited by physical barriers.
We were excited about the opportunity to truly welcome the international Microservices community to this year’s µCon.
Who's was there?
This year's speakers included:
Explore µCon: The Microservices eXchange 2021
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Our 2-day online conference features two full days of expert-led talks. We'll be announcing new speakers every week until the conference.
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Revisit 2019
View (or review) 50+ talks and sessions from μCon: The Microservices eXchange in our library of SkillsCast videos.
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Day 1: μCon: The Microservices eXchange
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When building modern architectures, the hard part isn’t learning Kubernetes or deciding whether or not to use Kafka. The hard part is changing the way (almost) everyone thinks. Many of our mental models and communication patterns have been optimized for feature-driven software delivery. Which means … if we don’t change the mental models and communication patterns, we will deliver the exact same system we already have. Regardless of how performant our microservices are. In this talk, we’ll explore this Mindshift: thinking in systems, designing for capabilities, drawing system boundaries, Agility at the core of learning teams and most of all, the essential patterns development teams can adopt when they get started.
architecture
feature-driven-architecture
event-driven-architecture
About the speaker...Diana MontalionShe has 17+ years experience delivering initiatives, independently or as part of a professional services group, to clients including Stanford, The Gates Foundation and Teach For All. She is co-founder of Mentrix, a consultancy providing enterprise systems architecture, technology strategy, team leadership and systems development. She is also Principal Systems Architect for the Wikimedia Foundation. |
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We have been building microservice architectures for about ten years now. And slowly but surely, the same thing is happening to us that made us sick and tired of our previous architectures. Technical debt is rapidly piling up, development costs are rising, and the architecture is turning into a big unmanageable ball. But, this isn't inevitable! With real-world examples, Carola will discuss how the RIGHT microservice architecture can rescue your organization.
architecture
technical-debt
microservices
About the speaker...Carola LilienthalDr. Carola Lilienthal is software architect and managing director at WPS — Workplace Solutions GmbH, and has been developing software architectures according to the principles of Domain-Driven Design with her teams for more than 10 years. She is author of the book "Sustainable Software Architecture" and in 2017 she translated the book "Domain-Driven Design Distilled" by Vaughn Vernon into German. |
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As a software development consultant, Matt gets the opportunity to work with many different clients. Over the past few years, his work with clients has quite often involved some form of Monolith to Microservices transition. During this talk, Matt will share the techniques he has found to make this transition a success. One of the most common things he sees when teams are looking to embark on a Monolith to Microservices journey is they are all too eager to ditch their monolith codebase and jump straight into building new shiny Microservices. From his experience, if the current monolith is not well structured and reflective of the domain it is operating in then it’s quite likely the Microservices journey will be a painful one. In this talk, Matt will argue why he thinks it is important to have a ‘Modular Monolith’ first with the appropriate domain seams modeled. These seams can then form the boundaries for future Microservices. This talk will touch on techniques such as EventStorming and Bounded Context mapping to identify the domain boundaries, as well as some core engineering practices that need to be in place (notably automation of testing and deployment, observability and general architectural governance). Matt will also discuss how to evolve integrations as your monolith evolves — including the often most complex integration of all — the database. "One of the big takeaways from this talk I would like people to leave with is that often a well structured ‘Modular Monolith’ can be just as good as a set of MicroServices depending on your needs. Something I have come to learn over the years working with clients is that you really can’t shortcut the core things, most notably — Continuous Delivery practices and Domain Modeling. Without these two things, no Microservices journey will be successful. Getting these things ‘right’ often takes time and can be an iterative process. Doing so with a single Monolithic codebase can make that easier." |
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In this talk, we are going to take a closer look at why modularity is needed, what it actually can do for us, and how we can increase our chances of getting it right by taking a systems thinking approach. The claim made is that a holistic view of the problem space is critical; one that consider all its parts, including the business and all the people affected. Software development today is a inherently a sociotechnical endeavour and any modularisation effort, be it information hiding, SOA, microservices, DDD, Team Topologies and more, must take this into account in order to be able to create solutions that are sustainable and have the necessary conceptual integrity. This talk will help you piece together all of the these good modularisation practices and understand the theory behind them, improving your holistic system design skills, and enabling you to create requisite coherence in your designs. Maybe this will guard you against the dreaded distributed big ball of mud, the killer of agility and productive collaboration.
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The power of collaborative modeling comes from having a diverse group of people who, together, have a lot of wisdom and knowledge. You would expect that all this knowledge will be put to use, co-creating, and to design a model. In reality, we don’t actually listen to all the available input and perspectives due to cognitive biases and ranking. Because not everything that needs to be said has been said, we will end up with sub-optimal models and architecture. Even worse, people don’t feel part of the solution and don’t commit to it. Good architecture and design need all the insights and perception. If we are not aware, cognitive biases and ranking kills those insights and wisdom, and kills the effectiveness of your models! Join us in this talk where we will interactively explore how we can improve our facilitation skills and focus on neuro-inclusiveness with Lewis Deep Democracy (LDD). We will let you leave with the knowledge on how to observe sabotage behaviour, battle oppression, and to create safety in exploring alternative perceptions.
architecture
collaborative-design
facilitation
lewis-deep-democracy
inclusivity
ranking
cognitive-bias
About the speakers...Kenny Baas-SchweglerOne of Kenny's core principles is sharing knowledge. He does that by writing a blog on his website baasie.com and helping curate the Leanpub book visual collaboration tool. Besides writing, he also shares experience in the Domain-Driven Design community as an organiser of Virtual Domain-Driven Design and Domain Driven Design Nederland. He enjoys being a public speaker by giving talks and hands-on workshops at conferences and meetups. |
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DevOps, Microservices, CI/CD, Pipelines, Test Driven Development all reduce time to production. But the bottleneck in software development has always been coordinating humans. Contract Driven API Development to the rescue! Contract Driven API’s enable independent teams (humans) to collaborate while maintaining consistency. This approach can also reduce handwritten code and save weeks of time. In this talk we look at how to put API’s at the center of your development, how to generate boilerplate code and tests, and get everything into a pipeline for continuous delivery.
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Day 2: μCon: The Microservices eXchange
A 2-Day Online Conference
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An event-driven architecture uses events to trigger targets and communicate between decoupled services to achieve massive scale and flexibility. This architectural pattern can also be applied to security as code. When applying this event-driven security architecture pattern, you can automatically detect security devitations and trigger automated security remediations. This security infrastructure can be defined as code and deployed as part of a continuous delivery pipeline. In this session, Paul Duvall, a founder and former CTO of an AWS Premier Consulting Provider and an AWS DevTools Hero, will discuss and demonstrate scalable architectures that integrate Amazon EventBridge, AWS Config Rules, AWS Lambda, AWS Systems Manager, and AWS Step Functions to detect and remediate security deviations across an AWS environment. What’s more, you will see how to automate the deployment pipeline that provisions these security resources as code. |
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In order to explain certain astronomical observations, physicists created the mysterious concepts of dark energy and dark matter. Dark energy is a repulsive force. It’s an anti-gravity that is forcing matter apart and accelerating the expansion of the universe. Dark matter has the opposite attraction effect. Although it’s invisible, dark matter has a gravitational effect on stars and galaxies. In this presentation, you will learn how these metaphors apply to the microservice architecture. I describe how there are multiple repulsive forces that drive the decomposition of your application into services. You will learn, however, that there are also multiple attractive forces that resist decomposition and bind software elements together. I describe how as an architect you must find a way to balance these opposing forces.
decomposition
architecture
microservices
About the speaker...Chris RichardsonChris Richardson is a developer and architect. He is a Java Champion, and a recognized thought leader in the microservice. Chris is the creator of Microservices.io, a pattern language for Microservice, and is the author of the book Microservice Patterns, which is available from Manning. He provides Microservices consulting and training to organizations that are adopting the Microservice architecture and is working on his third startup Eventuate, an application platform for developing Transactional Microservices. |
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The implementation of micro frontends has, so far, been anything but easy. Since common frameworks and build tools didn't even know this idea, you had to dig into the tricks bag. Module Federation offered by Webpack 5 initiates a crucial change of direction here. It allows you to load separately compiled applications at runtime, and to share libraries between them. As webpack is used together with mainly all frontend frameworks nowadays, Module Federation is going to become widespread. In this session, you will learn how to use this mechanism to create micro frontends with Angular. Besides the default scenarios, we also look into dynamic Module Federation, sharing libraries, and dealing with version mismatches. At the end of the session, you will know how to use Module Federation in your projects and what the consequences are.
devops
angular
webpack
microservices
About the speaker...Manfred SteyerManfred Steyer is a trainer, consultant, and programming architect with a focus on Angular. He is a Google Developer Expert (GDE) and Trusted Collaborator in the Angular team who writes for O'Reilly, the German Java Magazine, and windows.developer. He regularly speaks at conferences. |
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NRK TV is a TV streaming service for the Norwegian public, serving hundreds of thousands of users every day. This is the story of how we turned an increasingly complex and stagnating monolithic API into a more rapidly evolving modular API. Two key elements in the transformation are hypermedia and domain-driven design. We use links to tie together bounded domain contexts that we keep separate to contain complexity. Clients can seamlessly navigate between e.g. editorial content, catalog, playback and personalized recommendations, without noticing or caring that different contexts could be supported by separate backends with varying degrees of criticality and separate failure modes. Since links enable us to support multiple paths through the API and more than one way to reach a goal, they also help us evolve our applications without having to coordinate updates for all our clients at the same time. Rather, clients can opt-in to new or improved functionality when it suits them. |
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Microservices present their own unique challenges around managing dependencies, continuous delivery, test automation and cost optimization. Oftentimes, these challenges aren't realized until an organization is well on its way to decomposing their monolith into microservces. In this talk, I will share my experiences with the toil associated with these challenges, and approaches we took to work around these challenges. We will walk through three specific areas of toil:
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While we all want to work on shiny new software with shiny new technology, the reality is that many developers and teams are stuck maintaining legacy systems. While typically these systems continue to work, maintaining them can be painful. Yet the cost of replacing the old systems with new ones is unimaginable and financially untenable for many companies. How do we deal with this situation without abandoning our clients who are not yet candidates for rewrites or even for lift and shift. In this talk, 30 year software veteran Julie Lerman, will share some of her own experiences and tips for keeping clients' businesses running while slowly helping them evolve to modern times, blending modern software practices into ancient systems.
architecture
legacy-systems
About the speaker...Julie LermanYou can find Julie presenting on Entity Framework, Domain Driven Design and other topics at user groups and conferences around the world. Julie blogs at thedatafarm.com/blog, is the author of the highly acclaimed “Programming Entity Framework” books, the MSDN Magazine Data Points column and popular videos on Pluralsight.com. Follow Julie on twitter at @julielerman. |
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Mindshift: how thinking differently is essential for modern architecture
Featuring Diana Montalion
Many of our mental models have been optimised for feature-driven software delivery. No matter how performant our microservices are, if we don’t change our patterns we risk delivering the same system we already have. This talk explores how to make the Mindshift from feature-driven to event-driven....
architecture feature-driven-architecture event-driven-architecture -
What Does a Good Microservice Architecture Look Like?
Featuring Carola Lilienthal
Microservices have been in use for a decade now and we're seeing many of the same things that turned us against previous architectures: Technical debt, rising development costs, and big unmanageable balls. But, this isn't inevitable! In this example-filled talk Carola will discuss how the...
architecture technical-debt microservices -
Modular Monoliths: How To Power Your Journey Using Continuous Delivery & Domain Modelling
Featuring Matt Belcher
Teams are often too eager to ditch their monolith codebase in favour of new shiny Microservices. But if your current monolith doesn't reflect your domain, you're all but guaranteed to have a painful Microservices journey. In this talk, Matt argues why it is important to have a ‘Modular...
architecture modular-monoliths monolith-migrations microservice -
Good Fences Make Good Neighbours
Featuring Trond Hjorteland
We know that good fences make good neighbours, but only when the boundaries are placed correctly. How can we create robust and sustainable modular designs when identifying those boundaries are so challenging?
devops ddd microservices -
Event-Driven Security Detection and Remediation as Code
Featuring Paul Duvall
An event-driven architecture uses events to trigger targets and communicate between decoupled services to achieve massive scale and flexibility.
devops security devseccon -
2
How Cognitive Biases and Ranking Can Foster an Ineffective Architecture
Featuring Evelyn van Kelle and Kenny Baas-Schwegler
If we are not aware of them, cognitive biases and ranking can kill the insights, wisdom and benefits of collaborative modeling. In this we will interactively explore how we can improve our facilitation skills and focus on neuro-inclusiveness with Lewis Deep Democracy (LDD).
architecture collaborative-design facilitation lewis-deep-democracy inclusivity ranking cognitive-bias -
Dev Faster with Contract Driven API Development
Featuring Jeremy Davis
DevOps, Microservices, CI/CD, Pipelines, Test Driven Development all reduce time to production. But the bottleneck in software development has always been coordinating humans.
devops microservices api -
Dark Energy, Dark Matter: Imperfect Metaphors for Designing Microservices
Featuring Chris Richardson
In this talk Chris Richardson discusses how to balance two opposing forces in microservices architecture: the repulsive forces that drive the decomposition of your application into services, and the attractive forces that resist decomposition and bind software elements together.
decomposition architecture microservices -
Real-world API Modularization with DDD and Hypermedia
Featuring Einar Høst
Einar W. Høst shares the real-world story of using DDD and hypermedia to modularize the monolithic API for the NRK TV streaming service to improve both reliability and development speed for new features.
architecture bounded-context hypermedia modular-api monolith-migrations domain-driven-design microservices -
Three Challenges in Microservices: Developer Feedback, Continuous Delivery, and Cost Optimization
Featuring Casey Lee
Microservices present unique challenges around managing dependencies, continuous delivery, test automation and cost optimization. Often, these aren't obvious until well into an organisation's transition to microservices. In this talk, Casey Lee will share experience-based approaches to...
devops optimization microservices -
Living with Your Legacy
Featuring Julie Lerman
For many developers the painful reality is that they are stuck maintaining legacy systems where rewrites are out of the question. In this talk Julie Lerman draws from her own experiences to share tips for keeping clients' businesses running while (slowly) helping them evolve to modern times.
... architecture legacy-systems
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µCon London 2019 - The Conference on Microservices, DDD & Software Architecture
Three days in London
muCon - The Conference on Microservices, DDD & Software Architecture is the evolution of muCon London and DDD eXchange.
distributed-systems systemsarchitecture communication observability event-sourcing cqrs devops collaborativemodeling boundedcontexts kubernetes cloud architecture serverless mucon microservices ddd event-storming -
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microservices mucon architecture serverless cloud -
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mucon microservices architecture soa cloud rest -
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mucon microservices architecture soa cloud rest -
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architecture cloud microservices mucon -
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soa architecture paas microservices cloud event-driven-architecture rest