Sam Newman on resilient distributed systems, the three rules, and cognitive debt in AI era
The Pragmatic Engineer · rss · 2026-10-08
Pragmatic Engineer interviews Sam Newman, author of Building Microservices, who calls microservices an architecture of 'last resort,' ahead of his new book Building Resilient Distributed Systems.
- Microservices coined circa 2011 at a Lake District symposium; James Lewis and Martin Fowler published the defining article in March 2014
- Two definitions: independently deployable services; or services split by business domain, not technical layer
- Three rules of distributed systems: information takes time to travel; things go offline; resources are finite — most outages come from running out of resources
- Idempotency: keys (clean but hard to retrofit) vs fingerprints (retrofittable but can reject legitimate requests), with a Danish payments anecdote
- Four resiliency concepts from David Woods: robustness, rebound, extensibility, adaptability
- AI and dev: with LLMs typing is no longer the bottleneck — cognitive debt and cognitive surrender emerge; hedge vendors with multi-model designs and consider swapping LLM features for deterministic code
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