Jan 2, 2019 · 26m · a16z
a16z Podcast | All About Microservices
Adrian Cockcroft · 14m spoken Martin Casado · 5m spoken Frank Chen · 3m spoken Sonal Chokshi · 1m spoken
0:00 / 0:00
▶ Watch on YouTube →
gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of the a16z Podcast, former Netflix cloud architect Adrian Cockcroft joins Andreessen Horowitz partners to discuss the evolution of microservices architectures, exploring how breaking down monolithic software transforms technology stacks, developer operations, and organizational culture.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. The host holds 4.3% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The host as informed peer 5.9 Guest teaching 4.4 Guest disagreement 1.3 The host pushing back 1.7
speaking balance: gold is the host, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 18:12 Investing in a food truck
Adrian playfully challenges the host excitement about single-function API companies by pointing out their limited market cap potential.
Hardest push from the host ▶ 18:03 Monetization in a bazaar economyFrank challenges the optimistic view of the API economy by noting how difficult it is for venture investors to make big returns when companies lose monolith scale.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 7:25 Distributed monolith pitfallAdrian educates the hosts on how failing to unbundle the database backend results in a fragile distributed monolith despite splitting code into microservices.
The host holds their own ▶ 8:06 Application-layer semanticsMartin Casado displays host expertise by asserting how microservices raise low-level infrastructure into rich application-layer semantic contexts.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The host as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The host pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Netflix's Journey from Monolith to Cloud and Microservices | 4 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Frank Chen guides the conversation smoothly, framing microservices as a re-dressing of older SOA concepts. Adrian Cockcroft explains why modern CPU and network speeds allow fine-grained SOA to succeed where legacy XML schemes failed. | |
| Organizational Transformation and Database Unbundling | 3 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Frank prompts Adrian on Netflix's organizational design and retraining process during their shift. Adrian details the architectural challenge of database unbundling, warning against creating a distributed monolith. | |
| Application-Layer Infrastructure, Security, and Developer-Driven Ops | 8 | 4 | 1 | 3 | Host Martin Casado demonstrates strong technical expertise by outlining how microservices move infrastructure to the application layer with rich semantic context. The hosts and guest collaboratively discuss developer-driven operations, continuous delivery, and compliance boundaries. | |
| The API Economy, Single-Function Companies, and Open Source Trends | 7 | 3 | 3 | 3 | Martin and Frank discuss the rise of API-first companies, citing Chris Dixon and open-source trends that eliminate traditional QA matrix burdens. Adrian offers a mild contrarian reality check on VC investment scale, likening tiny API startups to investing in a food truck. | |
| Technical Evolution: Containers, Serverless, and Ephemeral Computing | 5 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Frank asks how CIOs can keep pace with rapid shifts from VMs to containers and serverless Lambda functions. Adrian explains ephemerality and uses an SMS billing comparison to highlight infrastructure metering overhead. | |
| Modern CIO Strategy, Platform Engineering, and Industry Adoption | 7 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Martin Casado identifies platform engineering as an emerging product-aligned enterprise buying center. Adrian elaborates on how CIOs are transitioning operations from ticket-driven cost centers to API-driven enablers. | |
| Future Outlook, Reimagined Infrastructure, and Developer Empowerment | 7 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Martin envisions a future where infrastructure management operates like a rich context debugger. Adrian concludes by highlighting how developer ownership improves morale and productivity. |
Statements from this episode (18)
Cockcroft: Netflix had 100 engineers deploying a single monolith every two weeks
“We started off basically running away from a monolith. We had over a hundred people every two weeks trying to get all the code they'd written in the last two weeks jammed into one code base, get it through QA and get that out into production.”
Cockcroft: Major tech migrations require a forcing function over incremental change
“And sometimes you find incremental change a good theory, but in practice, You have to have a big enough stick to hit everybody with, to make everything move at once.”
Cockcroft: Lower network overhead enables microservices 1/100th the size of SOA
“On relatively slow CPUs compared to what we have today on relatively slow networks, we were processing big fat lumps of XML and passing it around, and we were really only able to break the application into a few large chunks because the overhead of all of the …”
Cockcroft: Test major tech shifts using small pioneer teams and fast experiments
“So I think the trick is to get a small team, go very deep, discover what you can and run a whole bunch of these Little projects where you're trying to learn as much as possible with the smallest possible input.”
Cockcroft: Microservices require shifting enterprises from project-based to product-based teams
“What you see with traditional enterprise siloed organizations is they're actually having to do a reorgan set up teams that own, that are responsible for services, and that's, it's somewhat unnatural for the way they're currently set up, but I'm seeing an incre…”
Cockcroft: Microservices sharing a single database create fragile distributed monoliths
“And it turns out if you don't break apart your database backend, and you just create lots of services to talk to it, you've actually created what's called a distributed monolith, which has all the same fragility of the monolith, and you can't update things ind…”
Cockcroft: Big banks maintain an illusion of cloud security compliance
“And a lot of what I'm seeing is a big banks and people like that. They have their existing policy frameworks and rules, and they're trying to apply it in the new world. And it looks the same. So they're happy because they're compliant, but they don't actually …”
Cockcroft: Putting developers on call incentivizes reliable code and safer releases
“If you put a developer on call, they write really reliable code and they don't release code on Friday afternoons and because they want a quiet weekend and, you know, they learn a bunch of practices about having a, what it's like to be on call and how not to br…”
Cockcroft: Quarterly software releases pose an existential threat to legacy companies
“There's an existential threat here that if you're doing quarterly releases and your competitors doing daily releases and continuous delivery, You're going to fall so far behind in the user experience that you're just going to suffer, right?”
Casado: Every software function will become an independent API company
“Like, I think, you know, we may be having an analog here, which is every function becomes a company, right? It's like even more, more granular than a command line tool. Every single function or logical function becomes an independent company.”
Cockcroft: Open source from Big Tech makes proprietary software startups harder
“So what you're seeing now is Twitter and Facebook and Netflix and Google and LinkedIn producing the stuff you actually want to use, which has already been tested at volume. And then it's actually much harder to build a proprietary software company because you'…”
Casado: Closed-source shippable software is dying out
“We've talked about this, but it seems like closed source shippable software is, is on its way out or dead.”
Cockcroft: Containers are one of the fastest enterprise tech adoptions
“Containers came along really over the last two years and one of the fastest takeovers of enterprise computing we've ever seen. It's quite, quite remarkable how quickly they were able to colonize the enterprise space.”
Cockcroft: End-to-end tracing is essential for monitoring serverless systems
“You end up doing, figuring out how to do end to end tracing as the only way you can monitor things rather than being a special case like it is now.”
Casado: Disruptive tech adoption precedes day-two operational tools
“With disruptive technologies is like the disruption happens first and then all the day two ops happen second.”
Casado: Platform engineering is emerging as a new enterprise buying center
“We're actually seeing the creation of a new buying center in the industry. I've heard it called platform engineering. I've heard it called the DevOps team or whatever. This is like budget allocated. It's actually viewed as a profit center as product aligned, b…”
Cockcroft: Amazon threat forced retail and media to adopt cloud architectures first
“This is also moving across industries. We've seen obviously media and entertainment and to some extent retail We're early movers, mostly because of the threat of Amazon themselves, causing retailers to step up to re-engineering. We're now seeing fintech or Wal…”
Cockcroft: Serverless architecture disrupts monitoring market with only two viable tools
“The monitoring tools industry is right now being disrupted pretty heavily by serverless. There's only one or two tools that have really come into existence in the last year or two that have a effectively a way of processing stuff that this is this ephemeral an…”