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Monoliths are not dinosaurs

allthingsdistributed.com

41–50 of 243 posts

Re: Monoliths are not dinosaurs

#41

Software would be 50% better if every developer understood Tesler's Law: "Complexity can neither be created nor destroyed, only moved somewhere else." The drive to simplify is virtuous, but often people are blind to the complexity that it adds. Okay, so your microservices are each very simple, but that made the interactions and resource provisioning very complex. What was the net gain? The correct solution depends on…

Given your last sentence incidental complexity can be created and destroyed (and is more difficult to destroy than create).

The quote would probably be more accurate as:

> "ESSENTIAL Complexity can neither be created nor destroyed, only moved somewhere else."

Re: Monoliths are not dinosaurs

#44
post #34

You know, I'm pretty sure you could build a PHP monolith in 2023 without a framework and it would do what it needed to do.

Now that PHP has lost its massive deployment advantage, step up to Rails or Python.

But PHP is blazing fast compared to either of those (hot code ready to accept traffic in all scenarios so we can ignore warm-up times)

Re: Monoliths are not dinosaurs

#45
post #32
post #5

Can't we all just go back? Seriously every system I've worked on in the last 10 years seems worse in every metric than what I worked on 2000-2010.

There is no going back. The industry has seen a 5X raise in money and people. It's only natural that a job that used to take 2 now takes 10 people because of those facts. And I agree. We've traded safety and a few other things that could have been ironed out in exchange of massive gridlocks, headaches and colossal facepalms. Performance is only on par if you consider the hardware improvements, it's crazy.

If you can have a monolith for $500/month with a team of 2, or a distributed system for $50,000/month with a team of 50, what manager in their right mind would choose the former. Zero prestige in that.

Re: Monoliths are not dinosaurs

#47

You know, I'm pretty sure you could build a PHP monolith in 2023 without a framework and it would do what it needed to do.

Can confirm. judyrecords is built on a near framework-less monolith in PHP + 2 search servers. Searches complete within 100 milliseconds and SRPs return in less than 15 milliseconds on average. Runs a trimmed down version of CodeIgniter 2 (released in 2012) updated to run on PHP 8.2. Still got the CI 2 profiler. https://postimg.cc/TLbvvSzm https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30481230

I wonder how many people did their own CodeIgniter updates. I’ve also almost completely transformed the thing, but the base is still CodeIgniter.

Re: Monoliths are not dinosaurs

#48

I imagine there are not many video companies running on AWS. It's really only Amazon themselves that can afford to do so.

Netflix is one of AWS largest customers.

True, but I'd say there's zero relationship between the AWS price list and what Netflix pays.

So Netflix doesn't really count as an example of how AWS is a practical option for video hosting.

Re: Monoliths are not dinosaurs

#49

Software would be 50% better if every developer understood Tesler's Law: "Complexity can neither be created nor destroyed, only moved somewhere else." The drive to simplify is virtuous, but often people are blind to the complexity that it adds. Okay, so your microservices are each very simple, but that made the interactions and resource provisioning very complex. What was the net gain? The correct solution depends on…

there is no silver bullet

Re: Monoliths are not dinosaurs

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right! Decide on the shape of the software, then rearrange your organization to match.

This is probably good advice for CTOs and directors who manage software products, but it seems to imply the rest of us have to make software that already matches the political structure.

Try building software that doesn’t match the political structure. I guarantee you will regret it.

You’ll constantly be dealing with all the problems because nobody else will care.

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