Building resilient systems with Sam Newman

About this episode

Brought to You By: • turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable. • Entire – Git hosting, rebuilt for the agentic era. Every agent session, prompt and tool calls: stored in your repo. • Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. — Sam Newman wrote one of the most-read books about microservices (“Building Microservices”), but he calls them an architecture of “last resort.” In this episode of the Pragmatic Engineer podcast, Sam explains his thinking on this, and he’s certainly well placed to do so; he was in the room when the term “microservices” was coined. We discuss what teams get wrong when adopting microservices, why independent deployment matters, and how microservices can help teams work more autonomously. We also delve into his new book, ‘Building Resilient Distributed Systems’, and Sam explains his three rules for distributed systems, why observability is essential, and also why it’s vital to take business context into account when deciding whether to fail open or fail closed on errors. We also explore how AI i