What Is Microservices March?
It’s a month‑long, free educational program designed to up‑level your knowledge of various microservices topics. (If you missed last year’s program, you can catch all the content on demand.)
What Will I Learn?
Microservices have transformed modern software by enabling developers to build a complex application out of small, communicating components that each perform a specific function. Even if your organization hasn’t transitioned into using microservices architectures, there’s a good chance it will in the future.
For Microservices March 2023, we’re addressing some of the key fundamentals of delivering microservices. Each unit includes a one-hour webinar that provides a high‑level overview of the topic, followed by a hands‑on lab where you can run through common scenarios using technologies related to delivering microservices. The entire curriculum is just eight hours of activities. You can complete it all or just pick the parts that interest you most!
New in 2023: We’re offering the opportunity to obtain a badge to show your network (and manager) what you learned. Learn more.
This year’s curriculum includes four units.
Unit 1: Apply the Twelve-Factor App to Microservices Architectures
- Speakers – Javier Evans and Jason Schmidt of NGINX
- Webinar overview – Learn which Twelve‑Factor App elements present hidden surprises and how you can avoid pain in your transition to microservices.
- Lab overview – Learn about the different types of configuration and informational data, and how to apply them to a service.
Unit 2: Microservices Secrets Management 101
- Speaker – Robert Haynes of NGINX
- Webinar overview – Learn how to reduce information leakage and exploits through proper secrets management, including secrets storage, rotation, and distribution.
- Lab overview – Use a mix of Linux tools and secrets management systems to safely distribute and use JSON Web Token (JWT) authentication.
Unit 3: Accelerate Microservices Deployments with Automation
- Speaker – Christopher Harrison of GitHub
- Webinar overview – Learn how to use GitHub actions to streamline and automate your processes, manage security, and quickly recover from failures.
- Lab overview – Use GitHub Actions to build and deploy Docker images and rollback automatically if a deployment fails.
Unit 4: Manage Microservices Chaos and Complexity with Observability
- Speaker – Dave McAllister of NGINX
- Webinar overview – Learn about the three principal classes of observability data, the importance of infrastructure and app alignment, and ways to start analyzing deep data.
- Lab overview – Use the official OpenTelemetry libraries to set up manual and automatic instrumentation of your applications, and Jaeger to set up data generation and collection, tailor data to your needs, and visualize the data.
Who Should Participate?
This program is 101-focused. You’ll benefit most if you’re transitioning into a company already using microservices, are currently deciding on an architecture, or are about to start your own conversion to microservices.
- DevOps and engineering leaders – Learn the common issues faced by every organization implementing microservices, and strategies to address them in a way that’s right for you and your teams.
- Platform and IT Ops – Learn the challenges faced by other groups using the system and understand what you need to consider as you guide them to success.
- Site reliability engineers – While microservices help teams execute more independently, they also introduce a large number of additional points of failure. Learn about the common areas of failure so that you can be one step ahead of potential incidents and be a valuable educator for other roles.
How Do I Join Microservices March 2023?
It’s easy! Sign up for free to get access to the program.
We love hearing about what you’re interested in and how we can make your Microservices March experience valuable and fun. If you have questions or suggestions, please feel free to leave them in the comments section below or connect with us on NGINX Community Slack. Stay tuned for more updates and we can’t wait to “see” you in March!
About the Author
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