Welcome. Thanks all of you for turning up, joining in, listening during your commutes. This is the ThoughtWorks tech leaders podcasts. Today we're going to be discussing whether or not cloud and microservices are the industry's new silver bullets. My name is Sam Newman. I'm a consultant at ThoughtWorks. I do a bit of writing and a bit of conference speaking as well. And I also have

the unenviable task of looking after internal technical systems. You can follow me on at Sam Newman,

or my blog is at samnuman.io. Joining me today for the discussion is Eric Dernenberg. Eric,

do you want to introduce yourself? Hi, my name is Eric Dornberg. I'm head of technology at

ThoughtWorks in Europe. I'm based in Germany and I do projects. I consult with our clients,

but I'm still looking after the growth of that region. So we're here to talk about cloud and

microservices, which are obviously just universally appropriate tools and technologies in any given situations.

So this is going to be a really short podcast, right?

That's what you could believe when you listen to some people, and that's sometimes what you see.

It is, again, this indiscriminate use of technologies that are good for a certain purpose

across all sorts of different problem areas where they're unsuitable.

And as usual, it is part of the responsibility that we have as a tech industry to understand

when to use which technology, because nothing much has changed since the no silver bullet paper

that was written about 30 years ago, I would say, at this time.

Yes, the mythical man month.

I sometimes wish many of the people that had brought the mythical man month had actually opened the book and read what was inside it. But it is an easy thing to do, isn't it? You see a presentation by somebody, you adopt somebody else's ideas, wholesale, and everything's going to be fine as a result. And that's not really the reality, is it? Yeah, I guess what I love is that a lot of people are talking about their experiences and they're talking what worked. And they always, and this is not really to criticize people, but everybody is writing, this worked and that worked and it was really cool. And there's always a silent for me, for us. And that is often forgotten. And oftentimes you get the early adopters who are the people

who are always on the lookout for new things, finding new things that works for them. They are adopting

these, but they have the skills to understand when something works. They can contextualize it.

And they often have a higher tolerance for failure. I mean, they understand they're out on the

ragged edge. They understand they're experimenting that things won't work. Whereas in other organizations, they don't necessarily have that same ability to know when something's not working and to pull out of that investment or whatever else it might be. And they know that they're searching. They know that they're in a different problem space. And if you look at the Knaivian framework, there's these different, I'm not going to go into this in detail.

Try to Google it with that pronunciation.

It's a Welsh word, if that helps you.

...