Interview with Quentin Adam, CEO of Clever Cloud | DevOpsCon 2017

Token-based authentication in microservices: “You are locking the defenders out of the castle”

December 12, 2017 JAXenter Editorial Team

#devops #microservices

Quentin Adam at DevOpsCon 2017

Microservices are all the rage now but this doesn’t mean they are a silver bullet. When you go down the microservices path you should expect to encounter several problems. JAXenter editor Gabriela Motroc caught up with Quentin Adam, CEO of Clever Cloud to talk about how tokens fit into the microservices ecosystem, when and why it’s better to transform a monolith into microservices and more.

Okay, Microservices are cool. But, as all the new trendy buzzword, it’s not a silver bullet, and there are several problems to manage. One is the authentication, distributed authentication is hard, and there is many ways to achieve it. Configuration is the second issue to be managed when dealing with distributed micro application strategy.

Quentin Adam

In one of his sessions at DevOpsCon 2017, Quentin Adam, CEO of Clever Cloud talked about the problems you’ll face in the microservices world such as

Authentication: distributed authentication is hard and there are many ways to achieve it.
Configuration is the second issue to be managed when dealing with distributed micro application strategy.

If you’re using microservices, you can have difference scaling agendas.

Quentin opined that HTTP is not for all and, more importantly, it is not ideal for microservices. Message brokers like Kafka and Redis are better in this case. Furthermore, the right size of microservices is very important — a lot of people are building a “noisy microworker army” but the network has two problems: it’s fragile and slow.

JAXenter editor Gabriela Motroc caught up with Quentin after his talk to discuss how tokens fit into the microservices ecosystem, when and why it’s better to transform a monolith into microservices and more.

Watch the interview here:

Quentin Adam is the CEO of Clever Cloud: an IT automation company, running a Platform as a Service allowing you to run Java, Scala, Ruby, Node.js, PHP, Python or Go applications, with auto-scaling and auto-healing features. This position allows him to study lots of applications, code, practice, and extract some talks and advises. A regular speaker at various tech conferences, he’s focused on helping developers to deliver quickly and happily good applications.