If you’re looking for the brightest microservice experts to learn from, you’ve come to the right place.
Here are the 29 best microservice experts worth following. As you know, there’s no shortage of high-quality talks and blogs about microservices on the web (especially now in 2015). But we decided to collect the absolute best developers you should definitely follow if you're interested in the topic.
Whether you’re a veteran software architect or a zero-to-hero developer, these experts give you the tips, insights and experiences you need to get the most out of your microservices.
Our list of the brightest microservice experts:
Martin Fowler
Martin is a British software engineer who works at ThoughtWorks and specializes in object-oriented analysis and design, UML, patterns, and agile software development methodologies, including extreme programming. He wrote half dozen books on software development, including Refactoring and Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture.
Twitter: @martinfowler
Sam Newman
Sam splits his time between consulting for clients at ThoughtWorks and speaking at conferences all over the world. Recently he focuses on working in the cloud and continuous delivery space, more recently focusing on the use of microservice architectures. He is the author of a book on the topic called Building Microservices.
Twitter: @samnewman
Chad Fowler
Chad writes both software and books: his best-seller is Rails Recipes and he also contributed to Tim Ferriss' The 4-Hour Body. He worked at 6Wunderkinder (acquired by Microsoft), the makers of Wunderlist, the highly popular to-do app.
Twitter: @chadfowler
Github: chad
Chris Richardson
Chris is a software architect and serial entrepreneur who helps organizations improve their applications (including microservices). He is the founder of Eventuate, a platform for writing event-driven applications.
Twitter: @crichardson
Adrian Cockcroft
Adrian worked at eBay, Sun Microsystems and led the Netflix Open Source program from 2007-2013. He works at Battery Ventures (a VC firm) helping companies with their product development cycles using microservices and continuous delivery.
Twitter: @adrianco
Brendan Gregg
Brendan Gregg is a senior performance architect at Netflix, where he does large scale computer performance design, analysis, and tuning. He is the author of Systems Performance published by Prentice Hall, and received the USENIX LISA Award for Outstanding Achievement in System Administration. He has previously worked as a performance and kernel engineer, and has created performance analysis tools included in multiple operating systems, as well as visualizations and methodologies.
Twitter: @brendangregg
Russ Miles
Russ has been worked in software for two decades. Now he is the Chief Scientist at Simplicity Itself and author of Antifragile Software.
Twitter: @russmiles
James Lewis
James is a member of the ThoughtWorks Technical Advisory Board and provides advice to technology and business leaders about web integration, evolutionary architecture, emergent design and lean thinking.
Twitter: @boicy
Gregor Elke
Gregor works at codecentric AG and wants to bring Node.js and the corporate world together using microservices for the greater good of both worlds. He is interested in Node.js, lightweight software architecture and „streaming“ data processing.
Twitter: @greelgorke
Github: greelgorke
Oliver Gierke
Oliver is the lead of the Spring Data project at Pivotal and member of the JPA 2.1 expert group. He has been into developing enterprise applications and open source projects for over 8 years now. He is into software architecture, Spring, REST and persistence technologies. Regularly speaks at German and international conferences.
Twitter: @olivergierke
Github: olivergierke
Alexander Heusingfeld
Alex is a senior consultant for architecture and software engineering at innoQ Deutschland GmbH. He supports customers with his deep knowledge of Java and JVM based systems. Most often he is concerned with the design, evaluation and implementation of architectures for enterprise application integration. Occasional speaker at IT conferences and Java User Groups.
Twitter: @goldstift
Github: aheusingfeld
Sudhir Tonse
Sudhir Tonse manages the Realtime Data Intelligence team at Uber. Previously he worked in the Cloud PLATFORM Infrastructure team at Netflix and was responsible for many of the services and components that form the Netflix Cloud Platform as a Service. Prior to Netflix, Sudhir was an Architect at Netscape/AOL delivering large-scale consumer and enterprise applications in the area of Personalization, Infrastructure and Advertising Solutions.
Twitter: @stonse
Paul Osman
Paul is a Platform Engineering Manager and leader of the Platform Engineering Team at PagerDuty. His primary interests are distributed systems, APIs and scalable teams.
Twitter: @paulosman
Github: paulosman
Steven Ihde
Steven is the Director of Service and Presentation Infrastructure at LinkedIn. He joined LinkedIn in 2010 and was a founding member of LinkedIn's Service Infrastructure team. He works on high performance networking, distributed service discovery, web frameworks, and Rest.li, LinkedIn's framework for building REST applications at scale.
LinkedIn: Steven Ihde
David Syer
David is an experienced, delivery-focused architect and development manager. He has designed and built successful enterprise software solutions using Spring, and implemented them in major financial institutions worldwide. He has deep knowledge and experience with all aspects of real-life usage of the Spring framework.
Twitter: @david_syer
Douglas Squirrel
In the last 15 years Douglas has been CTO at startups in financial services and e-commerce and is currently VP Technology at children's payment-card firm Osper. He has taught 3rd grade, started a one-man business, and performed in comedy sketches. He also advises startup founders and tech leaders.
Twitter: @douglassquirrel
Richard Rodger
Richard is the CTO and co-founder of nearForm, a Node.js specialist company in Europe. He is very enthusiastic about open-source projects: he is the author of Seneca.js, a microservices tool kit for Node.js, and nodezoo.com, a search engine for Node.js modules. He is the author of "Mobile Application Development in the Cloud".
Twitter: @rjrodger
Github: rjrodger
Daniel Bryant
Daniel is a Principal Consultant for OpenCredo, a software consultancy and delivery company. Currently he specialises in enabling agility within organisations by introducing better requirement gathering and planning techniques and introducing DevOps culturehagy. He is a leader within the London Java Community (LJC), where he acts as a mentor and assists with organising meetups and hackdays.
Twitter: @danielbryantuk
Github: daniel-bryant-uk
Viktor Klang
Viktor is a passionate programmer who is into concurrency paradigms and performance optimization. He is Chief Software Architect at Typesafe. He's a big fan of agile development, scalable software and elegant code and spent the past 7 years building a EIS, ERP, CRM and PDM system for a large international enterprise.
Twitter: @viktorklang
Udi Dahan
Udi Dahan is an expert on Service-Oriented Architectures and Domain-Driven Design and also the creator of NServiceBus, the most popular service bus for .NET.
Twitter: @UdiDahan
Stephane Maldini
Stephane is Software Architect at Pivotal with experience aligning various OSS technologies. He is interested in cloud computing, data science and messaging. He co-founded the Reactor Project to help developers create reactive, low-latency, fast data architectures on the JVM and beyond.
Twitter: @smaldini
Github:
Greg Young
Greg is an independent consultant and serial entrepreneur. He coined the term "CQRS" (Command Query Responsibility Segregation) and it was instantly picked up by the community who have elaborated upon it ever since. He's a frequent contributor to InfoQ, speaker/trainer at Skills Matter and also a well-known speaker at international conferences.
Twitter: @gregyoung
Jakub Korab
Jakub runs his own consultancy called Ameliant, working in the area of open source integration and messaging. He developed scalable, fault-tolerant and performant system integrations. He is co-author of the “Apache Camel Developer's Cookbook”.
Twitter: @jakekorab
Github: jkorab
Bert Ertman
Bert is a Fellow at Luminis in the Netherlands. Besides his day job he is a Java User Group leader for NLJUG, the Dutch Java User Group (~4000 members). A frequent speaker on Java and Software Architecture related topics as well as a book author and member of the editorial advisory board for Dutch software development magazine: Java Magazine.
Twitter: @bertertman
James Strachan
James created the Groovy programming language, Apache Camel and was one of the founders of these open source projects: Apache ActiveMQ, Apache ServiceMix, fabric8 and hawtio. James is currently a Senior Consulting Software Engineer at Red Hat.
Twitter: @jstrachan
Brendan McAdams
Brendan works at Netflix having previously worked within the Professional Services team at Typesafe. He has made various contributions to open-source projects in the past including building a Linux Driver for the Lego Mindstorms system. At TS he helped Scala, Akka, and Play users better understand and deploy the Typesafe Stack. He also developed and maintained Casbah, the MongoDB driver for Scala, and a connector to integrate Hadoop + MongoDB.
Twitter: @rit
Vivek Juneja
Vivek is an engineer based in Seoul who is focused on cloud services and microservices. He started working with cloud platforms in 2008, and was an early adopter of AWS and Eucalyptus. He’s also a technology evangelist and speaks at various technology conferences in India.
Twitter: @vivekjuneja
Stefan Borsje
Stefan is the co-founder and CTO of Karma: Karma’s product is a mobile WiFi device without the monthly fees and contracts. They use microservices in production for their backend API.
Twitter: @sborsje
Github:
Tom Watson
Tom is the co-founder and CTO of Hubble, an office space marketplace by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs. He founded Kick Campus to connect talented university students to jobs in startups. They recently switched their architecture from a Django monolith to microservices.
Twitter: @watsontom100
Let's finish the list with Melvin Conway's famous quote:
"Organizations which design systems (...) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations."
What does it mean? It means that microservices are not just a pattern for your infrastructure - if you want to be successful with them you have to adapt your organization at the first place.
Further reading
Why you should start using microservices