Meet Sam Newman

Summary of Sam Newman and his portfolio site

Sam Newman is a London-based technologist, independent consultant, speaker, trainer, and author. His work centers on microservices, cloud, continuous delivery, distributed systems, and increasingly resilience in sociotechnical systems. He previously spent 12 years at ThoughtWorks and says he was involved around the time Continuous Delivery ideas were emerging; he also helped create early AWS training workshops, contributed to DBDeploy, and co-created the Lego XP Game for teaching Agile concepts.

His website functions as a professional hub for his consulting, speaking, training, and writing.

What he works on

Sam’s core areas are:

• Microservice architecture — design, adoption, migration, decomposition, integration, testing, security, observability, scaling, and organizational impacts.
• Monolith decomposition — helping teams incrementally move from existing monolithic systems to microservices rather than attempting full rewrites.
• Cloud and continuous delivery — especially where architecture and delivery practices intersect.
• Resilient distributed systems — his current major writing focus, covering timeouts, retries, idempotency, observability, disaster recovery, progressive collapse, incident management, and sociotechnical resilience.
• Training and advisory work — he offers consulting, private workshops, public workshops, online training, and conference talks.

Books and writing

Sam is best known as the author of O’Reilly books on microservices:

• Building Microservices, 2nd Edition — a major rewrite of his earlier book, covering microservice foundations, implementation, people/organization topics, communication, deployment, testing, observability, security, resiliency, scaling, UI patterns, and evolutionary architecture.
• Monolith to Microservices — a practical guide to incrementally decomposing monolithic systems, including patterns like Strangler Fig, UI Composition, Branch by Abstraction, Change Data Capture, database decomposition, sagas, and migration planning.
• Building Resilient Distributed Systems — his forthcoming/latest book, currently described as in final editing and available in early access. It focuses on keeping distributed systems stable and useful through both technical patterns and people/process/culture.
• Building Microservices — the original edition.
• Lightweight Systems for Realtime Monitoring — a short O’Reilly book about modern monitoring approaches.
• Contributions to ThoughtWorks Anthology, Volume 2.

The site also includes a patterns section where he documents architecture and migration patterns such as Strangler Fig, UI Composition, Branch by Abstraction, Backends for Frontends, and tenancy patterns.

His blog includes older posts and podcast/interview material, plus a 2023 post, “Don’t Call It A Platform”, discussing platform engineering.

Speaking, workshops, and training

Sam has been speaking at conferences globally for over a decade. His current talks and workshops cover subjects such as:

• architecting for AI uncertainty,
• progressive collapse and cascading failure,
• resilience models,
• timeouts/retries/idempotency,
• asynchronous systems,
• cloud and microservices,
• microservice coupling and cohesion,
• serverless and microservices,
• monolith decomposition,
• microservice security,
• cloud native architecture,
• feature branching and toggles.

His workshops include topics such as microservice integration, monolith-to-microservices migration, and building microservices. He also offers online training through O’Reilly Learning, including microservice fundamentals, collaboration, data decomposition, and application decomposition. His video courses focus on securing microservices and serverless fundamentals for microservices.

Social/contact presence

The site links to:

• Mastodon
• LinkedIn
• X/Twitter

Overall, Sam Newman’s portfolio presents him as a highly experienced software architecture consultant and educator whose specialty is helping organizations understand, adopt, evolve, and operate microservice and distributed-system architectures responsibly.