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You Don't Need Microservices

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Re: You Don't Need Microservices

#141

Post by jnash »

barking_biscuit wrote: post #133
throwaway894345 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary. An experienced architect defines the boundaries and then the microservice architecture enforced them in a way that a monolithic architecture cannot.

My 2c is that an experience architect would know that it would be ideal if they could do this and be right, but in practice they aren't likely to get those boundaries correct up-front and it takes time and experience working in the domain to see what those boundaries truly ought to be. Also, it's perfectly possible for monolithic applications to enforce boundaries as strict as microservices do via a "modular monolith…

100% agree. You can write bad code using both Monoliths and Microservices. However Microservices are inherently more complex and slower than Monoliths (because of the added encoding/decoding and network overhead).

Re: You Don't Need Microservices

#142

Post by jnash »

arinlen wrote: post #107
throwaway894345 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That sounds like a "True Scotsman" argument. The fact is that microservices are inherently and objectively more complex than Monoliths. So if you can't build a well engineered Monolith then you are pretty much guaranteed to build an even worse Microservices system (because you now have the added encoding/decoding, network hops, latency and timing issues, no guaranteed data consistency, no global commit guarantees etc. etc. etc.)

Re: You Don't Need Microservices

#143

Post by jnash »

honkycat wrote: post #44
DoneWithAllThat wrote: post #34

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.

There are a lot of small shops who aren't dealing with scale, and assume that what works for them works for everyone. Personally, I think micro-services should be approached very carefully but I understand the idea of them.

Companies like Jane Street use Monoliths to handle millions of transactions per second. How many transactions per second do you have?

Re: You Don't Need Microservices

#144

Post by jnash »

blowski wrote: 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?!”

Yep because it is true. Microservices is just the latest "Silver Bullet" that inexperienced developers think will save themselves from doing bad work. The reality is that microservices is inherently more complex than monoliths. So the more you can discourage developers from making that mistake the better.

Re: You Don't Need Microservices

#145

Post by jnash »

anonymoushn wrote: post #74
foobiekr wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A crypto exchange has bragged about having 30ish microservices per engineer. It's pretty wild.

I think that using the word "stupid" instead of "wild" would be more accurate.

Re: You Don't Need Microservices

#146

Post by jnash »

revskill wrote: post #17

Microservice is to manage junior level programmers who don't know how to make loosely coupling architecture. That's it. Because your job is to manage low quality code produced by junior devs, you need to use microservice to prevent bad code to break the monothlic. Edit: For more context, this opinion is more about "the art of developer management", not much about infra, security, scalability stuff

I have 15+ years of management experience and I have never ever had a problem managing developers at all skill level. You can't solve management issues with technology. You solve it with people skills. I sincerely hope you are not and have never been a manager. There are already enough arrogant and incompetent managers out there.

Re: You Don't Need Microservices

#147

Post by _hcuq »

barking_biscuit wrote: post #130
KronisLV wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I'm forced to work with a monolith that has 4000+ source files and takes a few minutes to even start up, and has about 20 configuration files that all need to be setup properly for it to even start, I wish for microservices. When I'm forced to work with microservices that need Skaffold and Helm charts just to run locally, but with the configuration in the monorepo being kind of mismanaged and strewn around a bun…

It turns out the secret is just not writing crappy software and having crappy processes. It turns out the caveat is that the conditional probability of those two things is vanishingly small, so regardless of monolith or microservices, most devs are exposed to crappy stuff and because their sample sizes are tiny they assume well we just did it wrong, when in fact they did it average and average is crappy for any and a…

I wonder if part of the problem is the always new technologies used. Maybe if the world had stuck with some sort of improved version of C and got really good at it, with all kinds of great tools and techniques, we might be able to deliver code efficiently.

Re: You Don't Need Microservices

#148

Post by jnash »

vasergen wrote: post #20
revskill wrote: post #17

Microservice is to manage junior level programmers who don't know how to make loosely coupling architecture. That's it. Because your job is to manage low quality code produced by junior devs, you need to use microservice to prevent bad code to break the monothlic. Edit: For more context, this opinion is more about "the art of developer management", not much about infra, security, scalability stuff

Micro-services also good when an organization has a numbers of teams with different domains and release cycles, at some point it would be easier to spit code in some ways and have a boundaries. In this case splitting to services/micro-services creates those boundaries on a network level.

There is this much simpler advanced technology that can be used instead that has been around for 50+ years: it's called libraries/modules. It works. Linux is a collection of thousands of libraries. Windows is a collection of thousands of libraries as well. Linux and Windows are way bigger than pretty much any other software out there. So I am sure this advanced technology is good enough to handle whatever you and most other devs are working on.

Re: You Don't Need Microservices

#149

Post by jnash »

jacquesm wrote: post #29
vasergen wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Micro-services also good when an organization has a numbers of teams with different domains and release cycles, at some point it would be easier to spit code in some ways and have a boundaries. In this case splitting to services/micro-services creates those boundaries on a network level.

Just 'services' will do. A couple of them tied together with a single front is >> a monolith.

You mean a Client Server system? That is not microservices.

Re: You Don't Need Microservices

#150

Post by jnash »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #76
revskill wrote: post #17

Microservice is to manage junior level programmers who don't know how to make loosely coupling architecture. That's it. Because your job is to manage low quality code produced by junior devs, you need to use microservice to prevent bad code to break the monothlic. Edit: For more context, this opinion is more about "the art of developer management", not much about infra, security, scalability stuff

Code quality is only one reason to use microservices; deployment frequency is another (you want people to be able to deploy their service without needing to coordinate with every other service in the system). Moreover, code quality isn't just encumbered by junior devs--in fact, in my experience it's more often managers pressuring developers to take shortcuts (e.g., taking a dependency on another system's private inte…

Nothing you say can't be accomplished by using libraries instead. The largest software on earth (Linux/Windows/...) is created by composing thousands of libraries into a single system. With thousands of developers contributing from all over the world. It works. It's proven.
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