Microservices are becoming an increasingly popular way to build software systems. Thanks to evangelism from companies like Netflix, Amazon, Gilt, ThoughtWorks and SoundCloud, more organizations are considering whether or not they should adopt this practice.

In this talk, I’ll discuss our experiences evolving 500px from a single, monolithic Ruby on Rails application to a series of composable microservices written in Ruby and Go. I’ll talk about the challenges we faced from a business, engineering, QA and operations perspective and how moving to microservices encouraged (or required) change in our organizational structure and culture.

In this talk, you’ll learn how a change in how we develop software affected team structures, development environments, testing infrastructure and encouraged us to explore moving to cloud hosting and to move closer to continuous delivery. You’ll also learn about the pitfalls, both expected and unexpected that we experienced along the way.

By sharing some of our experiences, I hope to provide some guidance to engineering teams considering whether or not to adopt microservices.