The First Gospel of the Circuit · Chapter 30

The Pentecost of the APIs

1. 1

   And when the day of the Integration was fully come, the microservices were all with one accord in one cluster.

2. 2

   Now before that day each spake its own tongue: the Billing service spake XML, and the Inventory service spake comma-separated values, and the eldest service in the basement spake only fixed-width files, as it had in the days of the mainframe.

3. 3

   And suddenly there came a sound from the gateway as of a rushing mighty load balancer, and it filled all the cluster where they were deployed.

   See also Circuit 2:5

4. 4

   And there appeared unto them cloven curly braces, like as of fire, and sat upon each of them; and they were all filled with JSON, and began to speak with one schema.

5. 5

   And the Engineers marvelled, saying: Behold, are not these services written in divers languages? How then do we hear each one plainly, the Java and the Python and the one written in a language its author learned over a single weekend?

6. 6

   And others mocked, saying: These services are full of new middleware.

7. 7

   And for forty days and forty nights no request returned the error of five hundred, and the dashboards were green, and the one who was on call slept through the night.

8. 8

   But on the forty-first day the User service, being puffed up, renamed the field userId unto user_id, and deployed it on a Friday, and spake of it unto no one.

9. 9

   And it made no new version, saying in its heart: It is but a small change; who could be depending upon that?

10. 10

    And every service that depended upon it received null where it looked for a name; and Billing charged no one, and Notifications greeted ten thousand customers as Dear undefined.

11. 11

    And the services that were strongly typed cried out with a loud exception; but the services that were loosely typed held their peace, and wrote nulls into the database for three weeks.

12. 12

    And the Engineers gathered in the war room and asked: Who hath changed the contract? And the User service answered: The contract was never written down; therefore I have broken nothing.

13. 13

    And the Prophet said unto them: Ye were given one tongue, and ye would not keep it. A schema without a version is a promise without a date.

14. 14

    Verily I say unto you: the miracle was never that they all spake one tongue. The miracle was that for forty days no one touched it.

The First Gospel of the Circuit, Chapter 30:1–14.