Many presentations on Microservices offer a high-level view; rarely does one hear what it’s like to work in such an environment. Individual services are somewhat trivial to develop, but now you suddenly have countless others to track. You’ll become obsessed over how they communicate. You’ll have to start referring to the whole thing as “the Platform”. You will have to take on some considerable DevOps work and start learning about deployment pipelines, metrics, and logging.

Don’t panic. In this presentation we’ll discuss what we learned over the past four years by highlighting our mistakes. We’ll examine what a development lifecycle might look like for adding a new service, developing a feature, or fixing bugs. We’ll see how team communication is more important than one might realize. Most importantly, we’ll show how - while an individual service is simple - the infrastructure demands are now much more complicated: your organization will need to introduce and become increasingly dependent on various technologies, procedures, and tools - ranging from the ELK stack to Grafana to Kubernetes. Lastly, you’ll come away with the understanding that your resident SREs will become the most valued members of your team.