181–190 of 671 posts
Ideally, What I want is the ability to decide later whether a particular call should be local, or RPC, and I should not have to care about any of it until I need to start scaling. I should also not need to specify locally what is going on - my reference infrastructure should handle turning the call into a jump-call or a net-call. Ideally, the fiber system that simulates multithreading for me should have an extensibil…
Microservices, while often sold as solving a technical problem, usually actually solve for a human problem in scaling up an organization. There's two technical problems that microservices purport to solve: modularization (separation of concerns, hiding implementation, document interface and all that good stuff) and scalability (being able to increase the amount of compute, memory and IO to the specific modules that n…
This happens a lot. Organisational problems conflated for technical ones. Technical solutions to organisational politics. Etc. It's often easier to admit technical challenges than organisational ones. Also, different people get to declare technical and organisational challenges, and different people that get to design the solutions.
There's also a dynamic where concepts are created by the technical 1% doing vanguard or challenging tasks. The guys responsible for scaling youtube or whatnot. Their methods and ideas become famous and are then applied to less technically demanding tasks, then in less technical organisations entirely.
I think if we can be honest at the actual problem at hand, 80/20 fixes will emerge. IE, the "real" value is not the architecture per se, but the way it lets you divide the responsibilities in the organisation.
Microservices, while often sold as solving a technical problem, usually actually solve for a human problem in scaling up an organization. There's two technical problems that microservices purport to solve: modularization (separation of concerns, hiding implementation, document interface and all that good stuff) and scalability (being able to increase the amount of compute, memory and IO to the specific modules that n…
This has been my major criticism of them; you cement the design of the app by creating an organizational structure around your software components. What happens if you need to redesign the architecture to meet new needs? That's right; it's not going to happen, because people will fight it tooth and nail. You also cannot produce any meaningful end-user value without involving several teams. Microservices is just "back…
This isn't easily fixable, but I'd like technologists to at least be able to perceive the extent to which the surrounding business culture has permeated into technical culture. I'm probably considered old AF by a lot of you (41) but I'm becoming increasingly interested in tools/methodologies that enable fewer devs to do a lot more, even if it means that there are sharp edges.
I am working on a project that uses a microservice architecture to make the individual components scalable and separate the concerns. However one of the unexpected consequences is that we are now doing a lot of network calls between these microservices, and this has actually become the main speed bottleneck for our program, especially since some of these services are not even in the same data center. We are now attem…
Twitter has a similar issue according to Musk https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1592176202873085952
> I was told ~1200 RPCs independently by several engineers at Twitter, which matches # of microservices. The ex-employee is wrong.
> Same app in US takes ~2 secs to refresh (too long), but ~20 secs in India, due to bad batching/verbose comms.
RPCs are on the server side. Why would they app take longer to refresh in India than in the US?
Some more explanation:https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/1592380440346001408
Microservices, while often sold as solving a technical problem, usually actually solve for a human problem in scaling up an organization. There's two technical problems that microservices purport to solve: modularization (separation of concerns, hiding implementation, document interface and all that good stuff) and scalability (being able to increase the amount of compute, memory and IO to the specific modules that n…
This has been my major criticism of them; you cement the design of the app by creating an organizational structure around your software components. What happens if you need to redesign the architecture to meet new needs? That's right; it's not going to happen, because people will fight it tooth and nail. You also cannot produce any meaningful end-user value without involving several teams. Microservices is just "back…
Also - talking of redesign should be a major lift for any product/service that has real paying clients. The risk of breaking is huge, and the fact that during that time you won't be delivering incremental value is also going to look bad.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those boundaries also increase the cost of development. If you are institutionally incapable of enforcing coding standards such that you can't prevent juniors from coupling your modules, perhaps it's worth it. But there are more efficient ways to build and run an engineering organization. The best place for such boundaries is at the team/division/org level, not team-internal or single dev-internal like microservices…
Are organizations ever capable of enforcing coding standards even remotely close to that of what microservices _should_ provide? Because I have not seen it. However this is muddied by the fact that I almost never see microservices, I see a lot of distributed monoliths tho.
I am working on a project that uses a microservice architecture to make the individual components scalable and separate the concerns. However one of the unexpected consequences is that we are now doing a lot of network calls between these microservices, and this has actually become the main speed bottleneck for our program, especially since some of these services are not even in the same data center. We are now attem…
> However one of the unexpected consequences How the hell... like... who decided to do Microservices in the first place if they didn't know this? This is such a rookie mistake. It's like somebody right out of high school just read on a blog the new way is "microservices" and then went ahead with it.
And both are way more common than they should be.
I am working on a project that uses a microservice architecture to make the individual components scalable and separate the concerns. However one of the unexpected consequences is that we are now doing a lot of network calls between these microservices, and this has actually become the main speed bottleneck for our program, especially since some of these services are not even in the same data center. We are now attem…