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You Don't Need Microservices

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Re: You Don't Need Microservices

#101
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a service for every DB activity; this is a fundamental misunderstanding about what microservices are, how to use them, etc so of course you're going to have a bad time with them. :)

Yes let's make every function call its own service with monitoring, a database, the network stack, management, and so on and then enjoy wonderful performance and easy management

Hmmm, great idea that way cloud providers can extract insane amounts of money from unsuspecting organizations. Let's call it function as a service :)

Re: You Don't Need Microservices

#102
post #37

I’d argue bashing microsevices is more in vogue than microservices themselves. They’ve reached that point on the hype cycle where you can get a whole bunch of likes by saying “microservices bad amirite?!”

Most of the real world "microservices" usage outside of FAANG has been to legitimize polyglot development (a net negative for most organizations) and the to create heretofore unseen levels of Conway's law. A microservice per person? Sure, why not? It's madness. The solution is to avoid the polyglot issue by fiat and to ensure that there is some actual planning and rationale around when it makes sense to add a service…

I'd love a number attached to that "most"

Re: You Don't Need Microservices

#103

I’ve worked for decades now as both a developer and an SRE and have never once thought either “man I wish these microservices were monolithic” nor “man this monolith is so great I’m glad it’s not a collection of microservices”. These kinds of articles seem to be written for people who work in environments I’ve never even heard of let alone experienced.

I think that all the time. Or more specifically, "I wish these services were a monolith so we could have better type checks/easier logging/debugging."

"I wish these services were a monolith so there was any amount of discoverability at all, and I don't have to beg for time from busy people on other teams to help me use their undocumented APIs"

Re: You Don't Need Microservices

#105
I don't know who these articles are written for (having read this one in a dozen variations) Sure I agree they're not always the right solution but do you think you're going to convince someone who thinks they are at some small company from trying to roll them out?

Re: You Don't Need Microservices

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that all the time. Or more specifically, "I wish these services were a monolith so we could have better type checks/easier logging/debugging."

"I wish these services were a monolith so there was any amount of discoverability at all, and I don't have to beg for time from busy people on other teams to help me use their undocumented APIs"

> I wish these services were a monolith so there was any amount of discoverability at all,

Why do you conflate microservices with discoverability? What's wrong with simply calling a web service?

> (...) and I don't have to beg for time from busy people on other teams to help me use their undocumented APIs

And you believe that the same hypothetical team you claim doesn't document their API would all of a sudden documented all its internal?

Re: You Don't Need Microservices

#107

I’ve worked for decades now as both a developer and an SRE and have never once thought either “man I wish these microservices were monolithic” nor “man this monolith is so great I’m glad it’s not a collection of microservices”. These kinds of articles seem to be written for people who work in environments I’ve never even heard of let alone experienced.

Same. I keep hearing that people have had bad experiences with microservices, but I'm not sure what those bad experiences are. I certainly don't relate to them. We had a monolith, and it devolved into a mess--managers would insist on people taking dependencies on stuff they didn't own in the name of expedience ("yeah, we'll totally circle back and do it the right way lol"). Microservices kept things neat by making du…

> Same. I keep hearing that people have had bad experiences with microservices, but I'm not sure what those bad experiences are. I certainly don't relate to them.

Likewise. When I see people complaining about microservices, more often what I see is actually poorly thought-through strawmen aimed at distributed systems, which boil down to "having to do network requests is bad".

I wonder why attacking the "microservices" buzzword gets these people on rage mode but the sight of a web app calling a dozen APIs somehow doesn't make them bat an eye.

Re: You Don't Need Microservices

#108
post #100

I’ve worked for decades now as both a developer and an SRE and have never once thought either “man I wish these microservices were monolithic” nor “man this monolith is so great I’m glad it’s not a collection of microservices”. These kinds of articles seem to be written for people who work in environments I’ve never even heard of let alone experienced.

It still depends on the organization size (or the size of the user base, or the complexity of the product). So you may only have experience with services where it was the right choice. I did see two instances where it wasn't. (I mainly work with/for small companies, startups.) In one instance I was called in as a tech lead/expert for a small startup having a kind of a product/software crisis. They've been working on…

> (...) The monolith they had was PHP, just to add to the fun, so switching over would mean switching languages too.

Why do you feel this is relevant, let alone detrimental to the idea of microservices? It looks to me that it's one of the primary positive traits.

> The guy, he was a smart and motivated chap, even started implementing one service in his free time (...) which somehow screwed up the monotlith and made it start crashing.

This statement makes no sense at all.

> Obviously, it was a 100% stupid idea (...)

I saw no stupid idea in any of your statements.

You stated the legacy codebase was crap, and that a team member took up to himself to do the strangler's vine thing and gradually peel responsibilities out of the monolith. What leads you to believe this is stupid?

Re: You Don't Need Microservices

#109

Some people will make an incoherent mess out of anything. A garbled knot of interdependent microservices with timing issues, bad extensibility, and unpredictable flow. An ornate matroyshka set of wrapper functions calling each other spreading over multiple directories making any modification a large error prone effort. Event systems, probably multiple, without any real difference between just a function call other th…

Amen!

Re: You Don't Need Microservices

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I wish these services were a monolith so there was any amount of discoverability at all, and I don't have to beg for time from busy people on other teams to help me use their undocumented APIs"

> I wish these services were a monolith so there was any amount of discoverability at all, Why do you conflate microservices with discoverability? What's wrong with simply calling a web service? > (...) and I don't have to beg for time from busy people on other teams to help me use their undocumented APIs And you believe that the same hypothetical team you claim doesn't document their API would all of a sudden docume…

If it was a monolith I would have access to the same codebase, so I could just go look at stuff in the code?

Versus microservices where I might not have permissions to look at their repos.

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