15 - Sam Newman on Microservices, Monoliths, and Building Resilient Distributed Systems
May 27, 2026 • 1h 21m
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About this episode
Sam Newman is an engineer and consultant, specialized in service architecture. He's the author of the books Building Microservices and Monolith to Microservices, and has helped many companies make informed choices about their service architecture. His forthcoming book is Building Resilient Distributed Systems.
You can find Sam on his website https://samnewman.io/.
0:00 Intro 0:57 The distributed monolith trap 6:30 Structured programming fundamentals most devs skip 10:00 Why long-lived teams make better architecture decisions 13:33 Building Resilient Distributed Systems: the book 22:00 Three golden rules of distributed systems 22:11 The human side of resilience engineering 35:56 AI's impact on PR workflows and code verification 43:13 Why QAs are making a comeback 47:33 End-to-end testing in microservices architectures 58:21 Containerization, public cloud, and DevOps as microservices enablers 1:03:53 When Sam advises against microservices 1:09:38 Idempotency: retrofitting vs. designing upfront 1:15:21 Trunk-based development vs. the PR process