Video: How Microservices Succeed and Fail

Learn more about microservices and OTT at Streaming Media's next event.

Watch the complete video of this panel from the OTT Leadership Summit at Streaming Media West, OTT102. OTT Moves Toward Microservices, in the Streaming Media Conference Video Portal.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Mark Russell: Microservices live in an ecosystem. If you don't have the whole ecosystem, the microservice is just a unit of packaging, of some defined service. If that's not built as a 12-factor app, where you've really paid attention to your APIs, you have automation in terms of how the product is built, and how it's tested, and indeed how it's deployed. If you don't have that notion of continuous deployment and evolution built into the concept of your product, then microservices is sort of an uninteresting thing to deal with.

Once you get there, then you find out very quickly how you're going to get yourself messed up if you just take a monolith and stick it in a container and try to float it. You can't deal with the monoliths in a continuous evolution fashion. You'll quickly come to grief with that, and you'll find you have to start to split it up.

We live with a foot in both worlds. Sometimes I think we have one and a half feet in one, and then a half a foot in another. Our broadcast and operator customers have a lot of legacy, and we respect that legacy, and we're trying to bridge that world between a legacy that we're an honored part of, and then trying to bring them to, evolve into sort of a new space, which is very hard to do.

So you get a lot of bending of the rules, if you like, when you're doing that. But you're doing that in the service of trying to do something good at the end of the day.