The Engineering Room with Dave Farley The 3 Golden Rules Of Distributed Systems | Sam Newman In The Engineering Room Ep. 40
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Oct 12, 2025 
Sam Newman, an expert in microservices and resilient distributed systems, chats about how to approach architectural decisions in software development. He emphasizes the importance of starting simply before scaling to microservices. The conversation dives into his three golden rules for distributed systems, focusing on time, targets, and resource limitations. They explore practical strategies like timeouts and retries, while also addressing the impact of AI on coding practices and the importance of maintaining learning opportunities for junior developers.
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Hedge By Modularizing Data Early
- Hedge future distribution by keeping transactional data modular early where feasible.
- Separate data modules while deploying together to make later splits easier.
LMAX Interface-Based Messaging Success
- Dave described LMAX's interface-based system that generated messages and used fast pub/sub.
- The model made distributed boundaries explicit and produced the nicest distributed system he worked on.
Be Honest About Network Boundaries
- Abstractions must either make network boundaries explicit or they dangerously hide them.
- Hiding network boundaries leads developers to write code that blows up when distributed.
