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The Great Microservices vs. Monolithic Apps Twitter Melee

highscalability.com

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Re: The Great Microservices vs. Monolithic Apps Twitter Melee

#11

Post by johnchristopher »

FooBarWidget wrote: post #4
coldcode wrote: post #3

Anyone else tired of people arguing complex concepts in tweets? So hard to read. People don't usually talk in single sentences.

Yes, extremely. I receive questions from time to time for which the answer is complicated (and if I simplify the answer, the important nuance will be lost). I usually write my response in a gist and tweet a link to it. But the thing is: Twitter is extremely easy to use and the barrier to tweeting is extremely low, more so than email. People are more inclined to tweet than to send an email, even for complex subjects.…

But why hasn't a twitter clone/alternative that would allow more than 140 characters taken off yet then ?

Re: The Great Microservices vs. Monolithic Apps Twitter Melee

#12

Post by ryandvm »

johnchristopher wrote: post #11
FooBarWidget wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, extremely. I receive questions from time to time for which the answer is complicated (and if I simplify the answer, the important nuance will be lost). I usually write my response in a gist and tweet a link to it. But the thing is: Twitter is extremely easy to use and the barrier to tweeting is extremely low, more so than email. People are more inclined to tweet than to send an email, even for complex subjects.…

But why hasn't a twitter clone/alternative that would allow more than 140 characters taken off yet then ?

This seems like the premise of an Onion article...

Re: The Great Microservices vs. Monolithic Apps Twitter Melee

#14

Post by lkrubner »

joshuacc wrote: post #8
lkrubner wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had this debate at my company. You might want to read this: http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/an-architecture-of-sm... It's important to realize that you are wrong when you use the word "continuum". In a true continuum you can move in both directions with equal ease, whereas there is an important asymmetry in the tension between micro-services and monolithic apps. Read this part: "There is an important asymme…

I found this to be a much better article than the OP since it is very focused on the practicalities.

The user "slyall" just submitted it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8204826

Re: The Great Microservices vs. Monolithic Apps Twitter Melee

#15

Post by derefr »

d23 wrote: post #10
lkrubner wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had this debate at my company. You might want to read this: http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/an-architecture-of-sm... It's important to realize that you are wrong when you use the word "continuum". In a true continuum you can move in both directions with equal ease, whereas there is an important asymmetry in the tension between micro-services and monolithic apps. Read this part: "There is an important asymme…

> But when you move from the monolithic CMS to an architecture of small apps, there is no need for The Big Rewrite. Uh, what? Maybe if your app is written The Right Way, but in cases where encapsulation and cohesion are poor, where do you begin splitting? Services, on the other hand, force encapsulation from the get-go. Why wouldn't it be easier to connect them -- it's what they designed to do.

You don't need to do a big rewrite. Instead, you

1. turn your current monolith into one service (e.g. "cms-legacy");

2. fork the monolith codebase and remove everything not needed for that one particular component;

3. rewrite your integration tests for that component to use gateways, such that they either can be talking to the componentized service or the legacy service implementation without caring;

4. refactor the component into your favored beautiful new SOA design;

3. ensure the integration tests continue to pass;

4. remove the equivalent component implementation from the legacy codebase, and reimplement the shell of its consumer-facing API with calls to the componentized service (think LibreSSL here);

5. ensure the integration tests continue to pass;

6. repeat.

Basically, this is the Big Ball Of Mud (http://www.laputan.org/mud/) strategy, applied to cohesion between services rather than cohesion between modules.

Re: The Great Microservices vs. Monolithic Apps Twitter Melee

#16

Post by bunderbunder »

johnchristopher wrote: post #11
FooBarWidget wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, extremely. I receive questions from time to time for which the answer is complicated (and if I simplify the answer, the important nuance will be lost). I usually write my response in a gist and tweet a link to it. But the thing is: Twitter is extremely easy to use and the barrier to tweeting is extremely low, more so than email. People are more inclined to tweet than to send an email, even for complex subjects.…

But why hasn't a twitter clone/alternative that would allow more than 140 characters taken off yet then ?

There's an interesting startup that I think does that. It's called Facebook.

Re: The Great Microservices vs. Monolithic Apps Twitter Melee

#17

Post by aikah »

bunderbunder wrote: post #16
johnchristopher wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why hasn't a twitter clone/alternative that would allow more than 140 characters taken off yet then ?

There's an interesting startup that I think does that. It's called Facebook.

Then why are people using Twitter then ? You cant say Facebook is like Twitter with more characters in the messages,it simply doesnt work.

Re: The Great Microservices vs. Monolithic Apps Twitter Melee

#19

Post by mbseid »

I also think a lot has to do with language and deployment. Etsy uses PHP for their entire codebase. PHP can be easily hot swapped without any overhead. It's all scaffolded and thrown out every pageview. This provides a much simpler deploy process and has much less impact.

Java on the other hand takes time to warm up. It just isn't practical to redeploy the whole app when you are just updated one aspect.

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