What other readers are saying about this guide

This is another excellent guide from the patterns & practices team—real software engineering with no comforting illusions taken or offered. This guide provides a detailed journal of the practitioners implementing a real production system using the CQRS and Event Sourcing patterns, and also highlights the tradeoffs and teaches the principles that underlie them. The topics presented are relevant and useful, especially if you are building highly scalable Microsoft Azure applications. You’ll be both challenged and inspired!

—Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice-President, Azure App Platform, Microsoft

Having participated and co-authored various guides from patterns & practices, the "CQRS Journey" follows the same walkthrough, scenario-based style, but adding even more fresh empirical content. It's a true testament of a skilled development team without previous CQRS experience, going through the journey of implementing a complex system and documenting their adventures and lessons learnt in this diary. If I had to recommend to someone where to start with CQRS, I would definitely point them to this guide.

—Matias Woloski, CTO, Auth10 LLC

The "CQRS Journey" guide is an excellent resource for developers who want to begin developing a CQRS system or convert their current system. It’s a true “trial by fire” approach to the concepts and implementation hurdles that a team would encounter when adopting CQRS. I would recommend reading it twice as I picked up even more lessons the second time through.

—Dan Piessens, Lead Software Architect, Zywave

I think it’s a really big step in communication with the developer community. You not only share your development experience with a broad audience (which is very valuable by itself) but you’re also open for learning from the community. While working on real projects it’s difficult to stop, find some time to structure your knowledge, prepare it in the form understandable for others. It’s very cool that you found time and resources for such educational effort, I really appreciate this.

—Ksenia Mukhortova, Business Applications Developer, Intel

I’m very excited about A CQRS Journey for a number of reasons. It explores, with an even hand and a fair mind, a topic where opinions are both diverse and numerous. True to its name, the guide captures the progression of learning. Conclusions are not simply stated; they arrive as a result of experience. Additionally, the project embraced a passionate community with a spirit of inclusion and transparency. The result is friendly-to-read guidance that is both diligent in execution and rigorous in its research.

—Christopher Bennage, Software Development Engineer, Microsoft

The journey project used Azure SQL Database (backing write & read models), Service Bus (for reliable messaging), and Tables (for event store). Production-quality, scalable cloud services that can be provisioned on-demand with a few mouse-clicks (or API calls) can turn some tough infrastructure problems into trivial ones.

—Bill Wilder, MVP, Independent Consultant

Perhaps the best lessons out of this guidance will be just how easy it is to work with Microsoft now that they are embracing more community and open source.

—Adam Dymitruk, Systems Architect

The work that patterns & practices is doing here is very important as it is packaging the concepts in a digestible fashion and helping developers to wade through the ambiguities of CQRS. The real world experiences captured within the journey project will be invaluable to folks looking at applying CQRS within their application development”

—Glenn Block, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft, Azure SDK for Node.js, Organizer at ALT.NET Seattle Chapter

The p&p team’s dedication and hard work go hand-in-hand with the very high level of competency present on the team. Their attention to detail, insistence on clarity, and open collaboration with the community all led to the creation of material representing enormous value to consumers of the guidance. I definitely plan on referencing this material and code in future engagements because I think my clients will derive many benefits from it–a win-win for everyone!

—Josh Elster, Principal, Liquid Electron

CQRS is a very important pattern, and a tool that any cloud developer should have in his or her tool-belt. It is particularly well-suited for the cloud since it allows for the implementation of massively scalable solutions based on simple, common patterns (like queues, event handlers, and view models, to name a few). Like all patterns, there are several concrete, correct ways of implementing CQRS. A journey of the type undertaken by Microsoft’s patterns & practices team is a great way to explore the different options, tradeoffs, and even possible mistakes one can make along the way, and accelerate one’s learning of the CQRS pattern.

—Shy Cohen, Principal, Shy Cohen Consulting

patterns & practices assembled many of the active and key people in the CQRS community to join them on the their journey with CQRS and along the way discovered confusing terminology and concepts that created opportunities for leaders in the community to bring clarity to a broad audience. The material produced is influenced from the results of building a real world application and expresses the experiences from advisors and the patterns & practices team during the development process. By request from the community to allow outside contributions, everything has been open sourced on GitHub. Anyone interested is encouraged to take a look at the guide or implementation. The patterns & practices team has been very welcoming to anyone who wants to collaborate on covering additional areas, alternative implementations or further extending what is currently in place.

—Kelly Sommers, Developer

Congratulations on getting to what looks to be nice guidance. I know that the announcement that p&p was going to embark on this project caused a twitter firestorm but you seem to have come through it well. I'm a fan of the p&p books and think you've done a great job in sharing good practices with the community.

—Neil Mackenzie, Azure MVP

CQRS is as much about architecture community as it is about concrete patterns—thus the project is aptly named “CQRS Journey.” The community involvement and engagement in this project is unprecedented for Microsoft and reflects the enthusiasm amongst the many (if may say: young) software architects from across the industry who are rediscovering proven architecture patterns and are recomposing them in new ways to solve today’s challenges. For me, one takeaway from this project is that the recipes developed here need to be carefully weighed against their alternatives. As with any software architecture approaches that promise easy scalability or evolvability of solutions, the proof will be in concrete, larger production implementations and how they hold up to changing needs over time. Thus, the results of this Journey project mark a start and not a finish line.

—Clemens Vasters, Principal Technical Lead, Microsoft Corporation

The experiences and conclusions of the p&p team match up very well with our own real-world experiences. Their conclusions in Chapter 8 are spot on. One of the best aspects of this guidance is that the p&p team exposes more of their thought processes and learning throughout the Journey than most write-ups that you may read. From arguments between Developer 1 and Developer 2 on the team, to discussions with experts such as Greg Young and Udi Dahan, to an excellent post-project review in Chapter 8, the thought process is out there for you to learn from.

Thanks for this great work, guys. I hope you keep this style with your upcoming guidance pieces.

—Jon Wagner, SVP & Chief Architect, eMoney Advisor

The CQRS journey release by patterns & practices provides real world insight into the increasingly popular CQRS pattern used in distributed systems that rely upon asynchronous, message based approaches to achieve very large scale. The exploration of the issues the team faced throughout the implementation of the pattern is extremely useful for organizations considering CQRS, both to determine where the pattern is appropriate for them, and to go into the design and implementation with a baseline understanding of the complexity it will introduce. I really enjoyed the candor around the approach taken, the issues encountered, and the early design choices that the team would change in hindsight. This is a must read for any organization embarking upon CQRS, regardless of what platform they are using.

—Chris Keyser, VP Engineering, CaseNetwork

It is a great resource on tactical and technical aspects of building a distributed system.

—Rinat Abdullin, Technology Leader, Lokad

I'd like to personally thank the team for putting together such a transparent journey throughout this project. I'm very pleased with the final release.

—Truong Nguyen, CEO, Nepsoft

It's a good read. Lots to learn from it.

—Christian Horsdal Gammelgaard, Lead Software Architect, Mjølner Informatics

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