NSBCon 2014 recap
Update: Particular has put up an awesome recap page for NSBCon London. All session videos are available there as well! And be sure to check out the excellent intro video.
NSBCon 2014, the first official NServiceBus conference at Skills Matter in London was a great success. I really enjoyed the sessions and hallway discussions with the participants about how they were using NServiceBus. Mark and I had the opportunity to share our experiences with NServiceBus in a session. Here are some of my personal highlights.
Barbecoa
Bear with me, I’ll get to technical NServiceBus stuff, but being a foodie, I can’t resist posting food pics as well. But if you’re really boring and don’t care about great food, you can skip the fun.
This was my second visit to London and we had a little bit of time to spend in the evenings to explore London. I arrived a day earlier than Mark to attend the ADSD Unconference on June 26th. My colleagues Marcel and Sander were also in town for a large ALM project they’re doing, so we decided to meet up and go for diner. Gordon Ramsay was out of our league, but luckily Jamie Oliver was close by with his excellent BBQ/grill restaurant Barbecoa. Nice ambience and the dishes were simple yet very refined and tasty.
Starter: Wood plank-smoked duck, cherries, maple dressing, red mizuna and pecans – excellent and playful taste combination between the smoked duck, sweet cherries and earthy pecans
Main: Unpulled pork, Caraway slaw, jalopeno cornbread – wow this pork butt was tender, and the combination with the spicy jalopeno cornbread was excellent
Dessert: Barbecoa brownie, Raspberry & Pink Peppercorn Sorbet & Aerated Chocolate – I love the use of pepper or other spices with fruit, made the sorbet really come alive; and chocolate brownies… no need to say more
Right around the corner was Barbecoa’s Butchery, where all the meat is dry-aging. Very nice. After dinner, I had a quick stroll along the Thames and St. Paul’s Cathedral.
And the conference hadn’t even started 🙂
ADSD Unconference
In February 2012, I attended Udi Dahan’s Advanced Distributed Systems Design course. Most attendees will confirm that this course is quite mind twisting if you have been brainwashed with the “Service Oriented Architecture = Web Services” dogma the whole time. Nowadays I think messaging and asynchronous systems are a bit hipper with all these cloud platforms taking off, but chaining web services into a ball of mud together was still all the rage at the time.
The unconference was an interesting way to get ADSD alumni together to discuss their experiences applying the techniques from the course. An unconference is an interesting format, where topics are determined by the participants, and then discussed in free format sessions.
We saw an impressive example of a composite web UI implementation by Lars Corneliussen from Faktum Software – BTW, I checked, but he’s not some distant Scandinavian cousin 🙂 Anyway, we discussed UI composition, whereby data from separate services is combined at the UI level. One of the interesting challenges I see is applying this pattern with mobile apps. Given the latency and low bandwidth that mobile apps have to deal with, I think it’s better to do the composition at the API level and prepare highly optimized resources for the app to communicate with.
The Particular team also facilitated a couple of great discussions. A discussion about Ops got me interested in Splunk, for holistic and pro-active monitoring of all sorts of events across a distributed system. I definitely need to check that out. Also, Indu Alagarsamy had a nice discussion about Routing Slips vs. Process Orchestration with Saga’s. Have a look at Jimmy Bogard’s blog for a great description of different Saga / messaging patterns. Danny Cohen coined the term “Bolshevik” for centralized process orchestration. I’m going to use that term from now on 🙂
One of the insights was that – in a way – routing slip is “Bolshevik” as well, as a routing slip also has a predefined, sequential route. I tend to agree with that, though the Routing Slip pattern can be useful for having messages flow across specific endpoints only.
I really enjoyed the nice discussions at the ADSD Unconference and appreciated the willingness to share experiences and lessons learned by all participants. Having them face-to-face in a small group also really helps.
London
Mark arrived shortly after I finished the unconference. We went for a nice long walk along the Thames to visit some highlights in London. Might as well make good use of your time, right?
NSBCon Day 1
The first day of NSBCon started off with a nice breakfast at Skills Matter. What a great location and a nice environment for tech conferences like NSBCon. Udi Dahan kicked off the day with a presentation about the past, present and future of NServiceBus. There were a couple more old timers in the room that also started using NServiceBus at version 1.x, just like me 🙂 Udi reminded us how awful the website and logo used to look at the time, and he sincerely apologized for ILMerge-ing all the external dependencies into NServiceBus. Yep, it was bad, but the team has made NServiceBus a very slick and solid product over the past few years!
Info Support was prominently visible as well as one of the event’s sponsors.
The rest of the program was a nice mixture of case studies with NServiceBus, technology deep dives and theory. It was nice to see how NServiceBus is used at big companies like Wonga (Charlie Baker’s session) to handle large amounts of payments and Spotlight (Dylan Beattie’s session) where it even plays a role in video encoding.
Most prevalent from almost all of the session was how important it is to have decent monitoring across your entire system. Luckily the new tools from Particular can come a long way in giving insight in a message driven system, but I think that you can’t do without decent, holistic monitoring. Dashboards that give insight into both the technical stuff that goes on in your system and functional checks.
This was also one of the points that Mark and I highlighted on our Best Practices session. It was an honor to present at this first official NServiceBus conference. We got some nice feedback afterwards. The hallway discussions afterwards are always so valuable.
James Lewis gave a great talk about Managing Microservices and Yves Goeleven taught us about using NServiceBus in an Azure cloud. I really like using the Azure platform, cloud architecture brings a whole set of new challenges to the table.
The day ended for us with a nice speaker diner. It was great to spend some time with the whole Particular team and the other speakers to share experiences. You don’t get that many NServiceBus users from across Europe together in one room that easily.
NSBCon day 2
After a nice espresso at the Goswell Road Coffee Shop, the second day started with a deep dive into the Particular Service Platform by Danny Cohen. He explained how the separate components work together to monitor, diagnose and even design distributed systems with NServiceBus. I especially like the role of ServiceControl, which can serve as a nice extension point for your custom monitoring needs as well. New Relic feed, anyone? I have blogged about ServiceControl and ServicePulse before.
To use Danny’s words: “I’ll let you take in the coolness for a minute”
The other sessions were very enjoyable as well. A look at the new pipeline architecture in NServiceBus 5 by Indu Alagarsamy and John Simons was very nice. I really like the new model, based on the Russian Doll Pattern. Mark and I already saw some nice opportunities for replacing things in our implementation with these new style behaviors.
Greg Young and Szymon Pobiega showed an impressive integration of Event Store and NServiceBus. Event Store is another product I definitely want to check out. Greg is a great presenter as well.
Jan Ove Skogheim took us on the journey he made with his customer, migrating a complex, web service infested system to a message driven architecture with NServiceBus. Some nice insights there as well. In trying to get the team into the right mindset, Jan Ove was very keen on using the right terminology. “When someone said ‘service’, I slapped them in the face” 🙂
And Andreas Öhlund gave some nice insights into the internal development process at Particular. He quoted Netscape’s founder while explaining why releases are sometimes delayed: “Don’t ship crap”. I completely agree.
What struck me was that Andreas used this image in his presentation:
So, both Jan Ove and Andreas use slapping… Perhaps some Scandinavian custom, but let me be the first to coin an official term for this methodology: Slap Driven Development. Interesting concept that I might try at work some time. You heard it first here!
In closing
NSBCon 2014 was a big success. Udi was visibly very proud to have a first official conference for his brainchild and rightly so. He has built a great company and community around NServiceBus. Looking forward to NSBCon 2015 already!
