Microservices: From dream to reality in an hour

Are microservices a wonder-pattern for rescuing intractably complex applications? Or are they just a restatement of the software engineering best practices we all should be following anyway? Or something in between?

How do they work? How should they be written? What are the pitfalls? What are the underpinning technologies? Using balloons, raspberry pis, and the cloud Holly demonstrates refactoring a monolithic application into microservices.