Perhaps Amazon reached peak saturation for its video streaming services so it no longer needed unknown unknowns from holding it back from using a more efficient monolithic architecture. Distributing services across multiple machines is certainly more scalable but all those API calls can add up.
Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs
21–30 of 526 posts
Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs
#22I'm pretty convinced that microservices are one of those things that make sense 5% of the time and the other 95% is cargo culting.
As for me,I have been trying to discover that 5% that cannot be done without microservices.
Like any tool, there is nothing that cannot be done without microservices. However that doesn't mean they never make sense. Microservices have certain costs and certain benefits. I can believe there are certain situations where the benefits outweigh the costs. Its just not most situations. But that doesn't mean it never exists. I could believe it makes sense in extremely large apps with huge number of different groups working on them, where the communication complexity outweighs the other complexities microservices bring.
Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs
#23I'm pretty convinced that microservices are one of those things that make sense 5% of the time and the other 95% is cargo culting.
microservices make a lot of sense organizationally where each feature team can own their own feature service.
I mean even then, it's still easier just to share one code-base and then shard service aspects if you have to.
You need truly gargantuan scale before things become logically separate code-bases.
Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs
#24I'm pretty convinced that microservices are one of those things that make sense 5% of the time and the other 95% is cargo culting.
[deleted]
Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs
#25Storing individual frames in S3??? Insanity! Their initial distributed architecture is unbelievable.
They should've serialised bitmaps to JSON and used SQS instead. /s
Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs
#26I wouldn't call it a monolith as the number of instances could be scaled up. Mono implies single instance. They just combined multiple microservices into a larger one.
Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs
#27I'd be surprised if this doesn't get taken down as it casts AWS lambda in an unfavorable light (and rightly so). That's the impression I have of Amazon's leadership but maybe I'm wrong.
The solution was using a different array of AWS resources so I don't see how anything is being cast in a bad light. Lambda is great for many use cases.
Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs
#28I'm pretty convinced that microservices are one of those things that make sense 5% of the time and the other 95% is cargo culting.
As for me,I have been trying to discover that 5% that cannot be done without microservices.
Remove reliability intercorrelations, so for example that your cart api and payment gateway is up and collecting orders no matter to what happens to the front-end services.
But then for perfect decorrelation you'd also need independent databases behind the microservices, and queues between them for horizontal communication,and few are actually going all in with that, and so fall in the 95% where they go trough te motion and the effort of splitting microservices,but reap no actual benefit from it.
Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs
#29I'm pretty convinced that microservices are one of those things that make sense 5% of the time and the other 95% is cargo culting.
microservices make a lot of sense organizationally where each feature team can own their own feature service.
Until one team need a feature in another service that makes their development grind to a halt and the other team is not prioritizing.
I have only seen this from the business side (I'm not a developer), but I have seen teams start coding in another teams service just to be able to proceed.
It's not always good to create silos like this either.
Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs
#30I've never seen successful micro services if the starting point is not a monolith. The most successful ones I've seen are hybrid ones where some parts needed to be scaled are refactored as a micro service to run in parallel.