I first picked this one up back in 2016, made it halfway through or thereabouts and then life happened - I was fairly busy at work for a couple of months and the book completely slipped my mind... Until now - 2020 the year I had time.

I honestly don't know what to think - the writing was above average for a technical book: the sentences were natural, the style simple yet not simplistic, explanations short and to the point, advice sound, no space was lost on waffle and even the humour was good! Unfortunately, that's not all you need to write a good technical book.

Each chapter and consequently the book as a whole is comprised of a collection of high-level principles, usually illustrated by using a made-up online music store as an example. The great thing about being a book that deals exclusively with principles and ways of thinking is that what you preach has a decent chance to stay relevant for a long time - as is the case here, where even five years later everything stated still holds.

However, it is worth mentioning that even in 2016 or for that matter in 2015, when it was originally published, the book was hardly a revelation - all of the principles presented here have more or less been known for years, have been tried, tested, and shouted from the battlements by Netflix, Spotify, Amazon and all the other big names who owed their business successes, at least in part, to the massive adoption of microservices.

Reading this in 2020, one can also see a glaring hole where serverless should be - granted, it was still very new and riddled with growing pains in 2015 but it showed tremendous promise, and I wish the author at least mentioned it in passing.

So, to sum it all up - even in today's landscape the book is a decent collection of sound advice... that more or less everyone already knows and has known for years.