Building Distributed Systems with Netflix OSS and Spring Cloud

With the advent of microservice and cloud-native application architectures, building distributed systems is becoming increasingly common for the enterprise Java developer. Fortunately many of the innovators in the space, including Twitter, LinkedIn, and Netflix, have embraced the JVM as they’ve built increasingly complex systems, with Netflix open-sourcing much of its toolkit for constructing these systems at NetflixOSS.

Spring Cloud provides tools for developers to quickly build some of the common patterns in distributed systems. Many of these patterns are provided via wrapping the battle-tested components found at NetflixOSS.

Coordination of distributed systems leads to boiler plate patterns, and using Spring Cloud developers can quickly stand up services and applications that implement those patterns. They will work well in any distributed environment, including the developer's own laptop, bare metal data centres, and managed platforms such as Cloud Foundry.

Patterns and implementations we’ll examine include:

  • configuration management
  • service discovery
  • circuit breakers
  • intelligent routing
  • micro-proxy
  • control bus
  • one-time tokens
  • global locks
  • leadership election
  • distributed sessions
  • cluster state

Matt Stine

About Matt Stine

My passion is taking a metaphysical approach to software engineering: what is the nature of the collaborative game that we continuously play, and are there better, more contextually-aware ways to play that game?

By day I lead a team tasked with taking a first-principles-centric approach to intentionally enabling programming language usage at the largest bank in the United States.

By night I write and teach my way through a masterclass in software engineering and architecture targeting early-career software engineers working in large-scale enterprise technology organizations.

What is the primary goal?

To win the game. More seriously: to get 1% better every day at providing business value through software.

Who am I?

I'm a 22-year veteran of the enterprise software industry. I've played almost every role I can imagine:

  • Software Engineer
  • Software Architect
  • Technical Lead
  • Engineering Manager
  • Consultant
  • Product Manager
  • Field CTO
  • Developer Advocate
  • Conference Speaker
  • Author
  • Technical Trainer
  • Technical Marketer
  • Site Reliability Engineer
  • Desktop Support Specialist

I've worked at Fortune 500 companies, a tenacious teal cloud startup, and a not-for-profit children's hospital. I've written a book, and I've hosted a podcast. I've learned a lot along the way, including many things I wish I'd known when I first got started. And so now I want to pass those learnings on to you, especially if you've only just begun your career.

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