The Death of Microservice Madness in 2018

Faced this a couple of years ago, and I was the lone dissenting voice suggesting this was not going to go well. Then I learned that "microservice" in reality just meant everything was going to be one nodejs process running endpoints, with ios and android clients hitting it, which... didn't really fit my understanding of "microservice"; that's just "service".

All of this makes sense but also seems unavoidable to some degree. Seems like a set of tradeoffs you make by going microservies that you should be weary of.

Having services fully state-decoupled via unified log is interesting. I’ve considered this but it seemed a bit complicated in terms of then being able to scale the services that need, say, local copies of user profiles.

Microservices are just another way for us to do premature subsystem decomposition -- because we always think that we can build components with stable APIs that will be small, clean and reusable. It's even more fun to put that subsystem into a different process because, who doesn't like a little bit of extra latency in their processing? I jest, but it's not such a silly idea. By making sure everything is in another processes and using the most inefficient IPC system available (TCP/IP), you ensure that nobody is going to do stupid things similar to what people tend to do with threads. The multi-processing aspect appeals to people because it helps them break down the problem into isolated chunks and reason about them.

The key here, though, is to realise that you almost never need multi-processing. The design challenge is actually the same whether you isolate your processing in different processes or not. However, it's much easier to refactor your code when you haven't put road blocks in your path first. If you are doing that, then it is easy to extract the functionality into a separate process if you need to (or even a thread if you happen to work in an OS that thinks that thread processing should be more efficient than process processing).

In short, don't practice "I must protect myself from the stupid programmers" programming and instead concentrate on writing good code with your coworkers.

You make a very good point.

Over the years, I learnt that almost nobody except the developer and maybe one or two peer-developers cares about good quality code. The management just wants to ship services/products. They don't care how good the code is. All they care is that they can meet their deadlines. Of course, good quality code can increase the chance of meeting deadlines, but working long hours can also increase the chance of meeting deadlines. Management does not understand code, but they understand working long hours.

If I ignore this and still care enough to write good quality code, in nearly all projects, I am not going to be the only one to work on the code. There is going to be a time, when someone else has to work on the code (because responsibilities change, or because I am busy with some other project). As per my anecdata, the number of people who do not care about code quality far exceeds those who do. So this new person would most likely start developing his features on the existing clean code in a chaotic manner without sufficient thought or design. So any carefully written code also tends to become ugly in the long term.

In many cases, you know that you yourself would move out the project/organization to another project/organization in a year or so, and the code would become ugly in the long term no matter what you do, so why bother writing good code in the first place!

It is very disappointing to me that the field of programming and software development that I once used to love so much out of passion has turned out to be such a commercial, artless, and dispassionate field. How do you retain your motivation to be a good developer in such a situation?