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It seems like the problem here was bad testing and micro repos, not microservices.
I'm not sure what they've been left with is a monolith after all. I would say they just have a new service, which is the size of what they should have originally attempted before splitting. In particular, as to their original problem, the shared library seems to be the main source of pain and that isn't technically solved by a monolith, along with not following the basic rule of services "put together first, split la…
unless they have 100 developers for 100 services. That cure is worse than the disease. Every service works differently and 80% of them are just wrong, and there’s nothing you can do because Tim owns that bit.
I've always said if the Linux kernel can be a giant monolith, in C no less, than there's maybe 100 web applications in the world that need to be split into multiple services. I've worked with microservices a lot. It's a never-ending nightmare. You push data consistency concerns out of the database and between service boundaries. Fanning out one big service in parallel with a matching scalable DB is by far the most sa…
> You push data consistency concerns out of the database and between service boundaries. Sing that from the rooftops. That is exactly my observation as well. All the vanilla "track some resource"-style webapps I've worked on were never designed to cope with a consistency boundary that spans across service boundaries. Turning a monolith into distributed services is hard for that reason - you have to redesign your data…
https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower/status/94025989833123840...
I'm not sure what they've been left with is a monolith after all. I would say they just have a new service, which is the size of what they should have originally attempted before splitting. In particular, as to their original problem, the shared library seems to be the main source of pain and that isn't technically solved by a monolith, along with not following the basic rule of services "put together first, split la…
unless they have 100 developers for 100 services. That cure is worse than the disease. Every service works differently and 80% of them are just wrong, and there’s nothing you can do because Tim owns that bit.
I've always said if the Linux kernel can be a giant monolith, in C no less, than there's maybe 100 web applications in the world that need to be split into multiple services. I've worked with microservices a lot. It's a never-ending nightmare. You push data consistency concerns out of the database and between service boundaries. Fanning out one big service in parallel with a matching scalable DB is by far the most sa…
(Further below, I'll go into in which contexts I'd agree with your assessment and why. But for now the other side of the coin.)
In the real world, current-day, why do many enterprises and IT departments and SME shops go for µservice designs, even though they're not multimillion-user-scale? Not for Google/Netflix/Facebook scale, not (primarily/openly) for hipness, but they do like among other reasons:
- that µs auto-forces certain level of discipline in areas that would be harder-to-enforce/easier-to-preempt by devs in other approaches --- modularity is auto-enforced, separation of concerns, separation of interfaces and implementations, or what some call (applicably-or-not) "unix philosophy"
- they can evolve the building blocks of systems less disruptively (keep interfaces, change underlyings), swap out parts, rewrites, plug in new features to the system etc
- allows for bring-your-own-language/tech-stack (thx to containers + wire-interop) which for one brings insights over time as to which techs win for which areas, but also attracts & helps retain talent, and again allows evolving the system with ongoing developments rather than letting the monolith degrade into legacy because things out there change faster than it could be rewritten
I'd prefer your approach for intimately small teams though. Should be much more productive. If you sit 3-5 equally talented, same-tech/stack and superbly-proficient-in-it devs in a garage/basement/lab for a few months, they'll probably achieve much more & more productively if they forgoe all the modern µservices / dev-ops byzantine-rabbithole-labyrinths and churn out their packages / modules together in an intimate tight fast-paced co-located self-reinforcing collab flow. No contest!
Just doesn't exist often in the wild, where either remote distributed web-dev teams or dispersed enterprise IT departments needing to "integrate", rule the roost.
(Update/edit: I'm mostly describing current beliefs and hopes "out there", not that they'll magically hold true even for the most inept of teams at-the-end-of-the-day! We all know: people easily can, and many will, 'screw up somewhat' or even fail in any architecture, any language, any methodology..)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
unless they have 100 developers for 100 services. That cure is worse than the disease. Every service works differently and 80% of them are just wrong, and there’s nothing you can do because Tim owns that bit.
But if you can explain to the team or the CTO why Tim is doing it wrong and how it is impacting X, Y and Z, then Tim will fix or be sent else where, no?
So they split everything apart because their tests were failing and they didn't want to spend time fixing them, and they they merged it back together by spending time fixing and improving their tests? It seems like the problem here was bad testing and micro repos, not microservices.
>However, we weren’t set up to scale. We lacked the proper tooling for testing and deploying the microservices when bulk updates were needed. As a result, our developer productivity quickly declined.
My impression after reading this post was that microservices were symptoms of problems in how their organization wasn't set up to implement them effectively, rather than the actual cause of those problems.