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Monoliths Are the Future

changelog.com

51–60 of 567 posts

Re: Monoliths Are the Future

#51

Pretty much microservices happened because of managers. Managers are promoted to high level jobs such as Director or VP based on number of direct reports. This won't happen with a small team of devs. So they need an infrastructure team, a devops team, a SRE team, a QA team, a microservices core team, an access management team, network engineering team, AWS integration team, and the list goes on. What was once a four…

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Re: Monoliths Are the Future

#52
That spiral thing just keeps spining and spining. Of course monolith is and easier thing to work with now, after we figured how to do write big multithreaded services in half reliable way. We also have large boxes that do not fail too often and do not cost more than 10 smaller boxes orchestrated with all the crap you need to run microservices based systems.

Re: Monoliths Are the Future

#53

Spot on. The metaphor I typically use here is cleaning up a mess vs spreading it around. If you have a really big mess and spend a year or two rearranging it into dozens or hundreds of smaller messes, yes the big obvious mess is gone, but the overall amount of mess has likely gone up and by segregating everything you’ve probably made it much harder to someday get to a clean state. If you’re moving to microservices be…

Complexity (as in unintended/unexpected behaviour) varies with N^p where p > 1.0 so having N messages of 1/N size is a definite advantage and does make it easier to clean up the little messes.

Re: Monoliths Are the Future

#54

With respect to the author, who probably is a much smarter person than I am, this is yet another in a long, long series of HN articles that should be grouped under "I don't know what the hell X is, but I was an expert in it, and I can tell you it sucks" I've seen X be a dozen things: UML, databases, User Stories, Functional Programming, Testing... It's too much to list. Yes. If you do it that way it will hurt, and yo…

Kelsey Hightower is a rather pivotal person in the Kubernetes world. It's unusual that he's basically cautioning people not to use the system he's so involved in. His point is that many people are doing microservices wrong

Re: Monoliths Are the Future

#55

What is old is new again. I've been a software engineer for over 30 years and have dealt with companies always trying to jump on the next bandwagon. One company I worked with tried to move our entire monolith application, which was well architected and worked fine, over to a microservices-based architecture and the result was an unstable, complex mess. Sometimes, if it's not broke, don't try to "fix" it. I can say th…

Agree with your last point. And as someone who really liked old school callback/prototype/closure based JavaScript, I can say not only would these people have been better off using a better language, they also ruined JavaScript for the things it was great at.

Re: Monoliths Are the Future

#56

I'm a database guy, so the question I get from clients is, "We're thinking about breaking up our monolith into a bunch of microservices, and we want to use best-of-breed persistence layers for each microservice. Some data belongs in Postgres, some in DynamoDB, some in JSON files. Now, how do we do reporting?" Analysts expect to be able to connect to one system, see their data, and write queries for it. They were neve…

In my last job I was a DevOps guy in a Data Eng. team and we used microservice (actually serverless) extensively to the point that none of our ETL relied on servers (they were all serverless; AWS lambda).

Now databases themselves are different stories, they are the persistence/data layer that microservices themselves use . But it's actually doable and I'd even say much easier to use microservices/serverless for ETL because it's easier to develop CI/CD and testing/deployment with non-stateful services. Of course, it does take certain level of engineering maturity and skillsets but I think the end results justify it.

Re: Monoliths Are the Future

#57
My employer adopted microservices for a very specific reason: it became nearly impossible to deploy the monolith. With hundreds of commits trying to go out every day, probability that at least one would break something approached 1. Then everything had to be rolled back. Getting unrelated concerns into separate deployable artifacts rescued our velocity.

It came with many of its own challenges, too! A great deal of infrastructure had to be built to get from O(N) to O(1) infrastructure engineering effort per service. But we did build it, and now it works great.

There is a reason monoliths were traditionally coupled with quarterly or even annual releases gated by extensive QA.

Re: Monoliths Are the Future

#58

What is old is new again. I've been a software engineer for over 30 years and have dealt with companies always trying to jump on the next bandwagon. One company I worked with tried to move our entire monolith application, which was well architected and worked fine, over to a microservices-based architecture and the result was an unstable, complex mess. Sometimes, if it's not broke, don't try to "fix" it. I can say th…

I can't imagine your level of cynicism. I've only been at this for ten years, and the number of times I've seen the wheel come full circle and old ideas come back into vogue, the problems with them rediscovered, reactions to those problems, and then the thing that preceded them again take precedence is somewhat depressing. At best I feel like we are grinding ahead a few inches each cycle.

Re: Monoliths Are the Future

#59

With respect to the author, who probably is a much smarter person than I am, this is yet another in a long, long series of HN articles that should be grouped under "I don't know what the hell X is, but I was an expert in it, and I can tell you it sucks" I've seen X be a dozen things: UML, databases, User Stories, Functional Programming, Testing... It's too much to list. Yes. If you do it that way it will hurt, and yo…

The author is essentially Google's chief Kubernetes evangelist, and extremely active in the Kubernetes ecosystem outside of Google.

Re: Monoliths Are the Future

#60
I think the greater takeaway is, "there aren't many technical recommendations that can be made in a broad, sweeping way". Anyone who says differently is just selling you a trend. The right solution is based on the use-case. This is the third or fourth time we've oscillated between monoliths and microservices (under different names, of course). It won't be the last. It happens in every corner of the industry. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to anything, as seductive as that idea is.
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