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Microservices are hard

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Re: Microservices are hard

#111

Post by asddubs »

jameshart wrote: post #16

Don’t you find it weird that everybody else is either over or underengineering, but you , you engineer things exactly the right amount? I bet when you’re driving, you also tend to notice that everyone else is either an idiot driving way too slow in the middle lane or a maniac speeding past you. Nobody else drives as well as you do. It must be exhausting for these people to live in a world surrounded by strawmen, whil…

now I'm not a fan of microservices, but I'll be the first to admit that whenever I finish anything I look at it proudly and mutter "hmm, this sucks"

Re: Microservices are hard

#113

Post by nwah1 »

fckgnad wrote: post #68
jameshart wrote: post #16

Don’t you find it weird that everybody else is either over or underengineering, but you , you engineer things exactly the right amount? I bet when you’re driving, you also tend to notice that everyone else is either an idiot driving way too slow in the middle lane or a maniac speeding past you. Nobody else drives as well as you do. It must be exhausting for these people to live in a world surrounded by strawmen, whil…

Don't you find it strange that YOU live in a world where everyone else but YOU thinks that everyone else around them is over engineering or under engineering things? You're not the guy who thinks everyone else is a maniac and is driving too fast or too slow. You're the guy who thinks everyone but you is under this delusion of thinking that everyone else is a maniac and you think you are an exception to the delusion b…

Love your metacognitive awareness. Excellent comment.

Re: Microservices are hard

#114

Post by koolba »

bradhe wrote: post #91
fckgnad wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you find it strange that YOU live in a world where everyone else but YOU thinks that everyone else around them is over engineering or under engineering things? You're not the guy who thinks everyone else is a maniac and is driving too fast or too slow. You're the guy who thinks everyone but you is under this delusion of thinking that everyone else is a maniac and you think you are an exception to the delusion b…

If you ask a room full of 100 engineers if they are better engineers than their peers, 80 of the 100 will say yes.

It’s probably true too! The peers are likely the less astute engineers who are stuck at the office rather than traveling to a cushy engineer conference.

Re: Microservices are hard

#115

Post by JAlexoid »

photonbeam wrote: post #58
Joker_vD wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you have to standardize build, deployment, configuration, serialization, logging, and many "little" things that are essential but secondary to the application ...so then you can go reimplementing those standards in 25 different services written in 11 different languages. Sounds like fun! I don't think it's possible to just write a library/framework that would encapsulate all of those standards and re-use it in diff…

You’d have to force everybody to use only one or two languages. For a time at Uber the direction was go/java only

It's a rational decision, to standardize on programming languages and paradigms.

Having more than two programming languages is honestly a nightmare to deal with

Re: Microservices are hard

#116

Post by __jem »

throwaway9870 wrote: post #48
monero-xmr wrote: post #10

Microservices - let’s replace as many interfaces as possible with the slowest, flakiest, most complex mechanism - the network layer. Why call a function when you can wrap that function in an entire application and call it via API? Why have a single database when we can silo our data across 200 mini databases? Why have a single repo when we can have 200 tiny repos?

So you embed S3 into your app? Do you embed your ERP system? How about your marketing e-mail system? Your CRM? Do you use an in-process database? Everyone already has a service based architecture whether they want to admit it or not. The question is the efficiency and granularity of it. If you interface with any external systems that have data records (ERP, CRM, etc), your database is already spread out. You need to…

Microservices are about fine granularity, not just "talking to other things." There's an enormous difference between "talking to a database" and having to figure out how to roll back transactions because your write to $lastNameService failed after you already wrote to $firstNameService when updating a username. The kinds of problems you run into with microservice based architectures aren't a result of "having services."

Re: Microservices are hard

#117

Post by ycombobreaker »

bradhe wrote: post #91
fckgnad wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you find it strange that YOU live in a world where everyone else but YOU thinks that everyone else around them is over engineering or under engineering things? You're not the guy who thinks everyone else is a maniac and is driving too fast or too slow. You're the guy who thinks everyone but you is under this delusion of thinking that everyone else is a maniac and you think you are an exception to the delusion b…

If you ask a room full of 100 engineers if they are better engineers than their peers, 80 of the 100 will say yes.

"better" is a projection of various personal features onto a single axis. If you ask those 100 engineers to predict their strengths and weaknesses relative to the room, they'd probably do an OK job of it. Asking who is "better" is asking for that, plus their subjective weights of those skills. You should expect that to be a pointless exercise.

Re: Microservices are hard

#118

Post by d_watt »

jeffbee wrote: post #73
ThereIsNoWorry wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's crazy the hate microservices get. I happen to work on a product that needs to scale to handle millions of transactions distributed all over the world and the cloud microservice system is just flawless for this purpose. Is it harder to debug than a monolith? Sure. You need a team that has a good understanding about distributed systems (most coworkers have degrees and the ones without are really good at self…

It is perhaps unfair to compare with Google, since the question of "how will we store the web" clearly calls for a distributed system, whereas the microservice haters are often speaking of systems with an ultimate user base in the low single digits. It _is_ true that with modern hardware you can monolith your way to serving thousands of users at 1 query per second. It is not true that you can incrementally modify tha…

> It is not true that you can incrementally modify that architecture to handle more users and traffic. One must carefully judge such things before committing to either the costs of a distributed system or the limitations of a monolithic system.

I'm a little confused by this, microservices or monoliths can both be distributed systems. A monolithic architecture (eg a Rails app) still usually has a separate database. You can even deploy that monoloth in different configurations (Web vs Worker).

You can then deploy many nodes of that same monolith, pointed at many different shards of a database to handle huge scaling needs. This is especially easy to do if the problem domain lends itself to horizontal scaling, like B2B saas.

I feel like the definition of microservices has gotten a bit murky here.

Re: Microservices are hard

#119

Post by KyeRussell »

fckgnad wrote: post #68
jameshart wrote: post #16

Don’t you find it weird that everybody else is either over or underengineering, but you , you engineer things exactly the right amount? I bet when you’re driving, you also tend to notice that everyone else is either an idiot driving way too slow in the middle lane or a maniac speeding past you. Nobody else drives as well as you do. It must be exhausting for these people to live in a world surrounded by strawmen, whil…

Don't you find it strange that YOU live in a world where everyone else but YOU thinks that everyone else around them is over engineering or under engineering things? You're not the guy who thinks everyone else is a maniac and is driving too fast or too slow. You're the guy who thinks everyone but you is under this delusion of thinking that everyone else is a maniac and you think you are an exception to the delusion b…

The best thing about this is that the person you’re responding to never claimed to not be delusional.

Re: Microservices are hard

#120

Post by CuriouslyC »

csomar wrote: post #36
jameshart wrote: post #16

Don’t you find it weird that everybody else is either over or underengineering, but you , you engineer things exactly the right amount? I bet when you’re driving, you also tend to notice that everyone else is either an idiot driving way too slow in the middle lane or a maniac speeding past you. Nobody else drives as well as you do. It must be exhausting for these people to live in a world surrounded by strawmen, whil…

What the author or many people miss is that this is still an unsolved problem. We still don’t know how to do this right. Doing it either way results in unmanageable complexity. The same still goes for the front-end. It’s too complex that someone decides to start another JS framework to fix the status quo. What many people miss is that these attempts are the solution to the problem. People will keep trying different w…

We are closer than that. Services are just aggregation layers for functions. The functions are the things of interest, and the aggregation/abstraction is meaningless from a runtime perspective. By creating a function-first architecture (ala Lambda) using a runtime with a common compilation target (e.g. WASM), you can have a single code-base with hints/IDE navigation while also allowing for polyglot execution.
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