An introduction to distributed systems through play - building a microservice escape room

We'll start with a working minimal implementation of an escape room with microservice puzzles, and see how they fail. From the failures we can see how each of the puzzles can be improved to be made more scalable and fault tolerant. We'll then explore some more advanced distrbuted 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 RabbitMQ
• 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:

• Arduino IDE, or
• VS Code with Platform IO add-on installed

In addition, it may be helpful to have docker with the following docker containers installed:

• `rabbitmq:3-management`
• `eclipse-mosquitto`