Learn Distributed Systems Through Play
Welcome to the funhouse workshop! This workshop is going to take you through the process of forgetting about building MicroServices, and guide you through to how to make them better Distributed Systems.
We'll start with a working minimal implementation of an escape room with microservice puzzles that follow a typical naive implementation of a "microservice architecture", and see how they fail. From the failures we will see how each of the puzzles can be improved to be made more scalable and fault tolerant. We'll then explore some more advanced distributed systems concepts
This workshop is intended for:
- Senior developers beginning to take steps into the world of distributed systems
- Developers interested in learning IoT basics
- Anyone that wants to learn how to make their existing microservices more scalable and fault tolerant
What we'll cover:
- Introducing the escape room puzzles
- IoT basics, reading and writing
- Triggering things through REST
- Where REST breaks down
- Introducing messaging via Azure Service Bus
- Routing messages
- Dealing with failures
- Delayed delivery
- What further patterns should attendees learn about
- Let's escape! A full play through of our escape room
This will give attendees an overview of the basic patterns of distributed systems enabling attendees to see how to transition their current systems to a better distributed systems architecture. Attendees will also get a basic introduction to IoT devices.
What should you bring?
This is a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) workshop. Therefore, attendees are required to bring their own device with the necessary software already installed:
Either:
- Recommended: Visual Studio 2022 with the Nanoframework extension installed
- VS Code with Nanoframework add-on installed
NOTES:
- The NanoFramework does not work with Jetbrains Rider.
- The NanoFramework extenions will not work on 32 bits OSs or ARM platforms.
- If you are bringing an ARM CPU machine, then you will have to have access to a cloud VM to do some parts of the workshop development. The bulk of the workshop will work on ARM CPU devices though.

A professional geek, William works for Particular Software writing amazing software like NServiceBus. Passionate about the web, he is engaged in a sordid love affair with JavaScript, and spends most of his free time trying to convince others of it’s beauty and elegance.
When not behind his laptop hacking away, this amateur beer enthusiast can often be found playing boardgames or drinking cold-brew coffee.