VIRTUAL | Eamonn Boyle & Garth Gilmour: Creating a Microservices Architecture with Kotlin, Ktor and Event Streams

Writing a single RESTful service is easy, creating a scalable design is hard. Developers building their first distributed apps in the cloud are frequently befuddled by both the diversity of frameworks available and the proliferation of candidate architectures.

In this workshop, we will pick three of the 'rising stars' in server-side development - the Kotlin programming language, the Ktor services framework, and the support for event streaming provided by frameworks like Kafka. Starting from first principles we will take a sample problem and model it as a set of interacting services, using Kubernetes to simplify the deployment. Along the way, we will discuss the different architectural options available and how they can be applied to produce a reactive design.

By the end of the day you will know:

- The fundamentals of programming in Kotlin (if you didn't already)

- How to create and deploy resilient RESTful services using Ktor

- Options for flexibly connecting services (such as Kafka streams)

- Pro's and cons of the different approaches to Reactive Design. 

Are there any pre-requisites?

This will be a fast-paced workshop where attendees will spend most of their time coding. As a consequence, you should have at least 5 years' experience in Java or C# and some prior experience creating RESTful services. Prior exposure to Kotlin is helpful but not essential.

About the trainers 

Eamonn Boyle has over 15 years of working as a developer, architect, and team lead. For the last 2.5 years, he’s been working as a full-time trainer and coach, authoring and delivering courses on a range of topics to a broad range of delegates. These include paradigms and technologies from core language skills, frameworks to tools and processes.

He has also spoken at a number of events and meetups including .NET Developer Guild, BASH, and GDG Dublin, and aided in the delivery of workshops at KotlinConf, GOTO Amsterdam, and RebelCon.

Garth Gilmour gave up full-time development back in 1999 to teach and mentor full time. Since then he's delivered well over a thousand courses and workshops to all kinds of programmers from all kinds of backgrounds. He started teaching C++ to C coders, then Java to C++ coders, then C# to Java coders and now teaches everything to everybody, but specialises in Kotlin.

Although self-employed for most of this career, he came to roost six years ago as head of learning at Instil. As part of that role, he speaks frequently at meetups, presents at conferences, and co-organizes the Belfast BASH series of developer events.