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Microservices are hard

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Re: Microservices are hard

#71

Post by [deleted] »

soperj wrote: post #66
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…

I feel the same way about go-to statements. Crazy hate. Harder to debug, sure, but they make things so much easier.

[deleted]

Re: Microservices are hard

#72

Post by mattgreenrocks »

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…

> this is still an unsolved problem. We still don’t know how to do this right.

Two reasons:

1. it is a self-inflicted wound in the form of the belief that software engineering is just a matter of throwing more bodies at problems

2. blind faith that "tools" are the answer to all our computing woes

Re: Microservices are hard

#73

Post by jeffbee »

ThereIsNoWorry wrote: post #62
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…

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 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.

A reason this succeeds at Google is that many of the microservice counter-arguments boil down to "yes, but what if I am a jackass?" If you are afraid of having to reimplement your structured logging framework for 11 different languages, I suggest you simply do not do that. Initially everything at Google was in C++ alone, then python, Java, and Go[†] were slowly added. Even after 25+ years of being Google they are not out there trying to diversify languages. You don't need to be Google to exercise good taste and restraint.

†: You needn't correct me regarding the niche languages that popped up here and there because I am aware.

Re: Microservices are hard

#74

Post by uticus »

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…

Epistemology, aka that thing from before post-modernity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology

Re: Microservices are hard

#75

Post by jameshart »

jfoster wrote: post #44
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…

I would argue the inverse. If you reject both extremes, and are somewhere in the middle, you probably are much closer to something reasonable. (both in engineering and when driving)

I actually chose driving speed very deliberately.

When you drive down a freeway, no matter what speed you are driving at, you will see far more cars traveling at a different speed than you than at the same speed.

The cars going at the same speed as you never pass you and you never pass them. The only cars you notice are the ones who are driving differently.

It is easy to convince yourself that you are taking the sensible middle course, no matter what speed you are driving at. Because you can always point to an extreme outlier and say ‘I’m not that guy’.

Re: Microservices are hard

#76

Post by techdmn »

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…

You should credit the late great George Carlin for this. :-) "Look at this idiot here!" "Whoa, look at that maniac go!"

Re: Microservices are hard

#77

Post by disintegore »

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…

It does not appear that you have read the article

Re: Microservices are hard

#78

Post by jerf »

No, they aren't. The entire point of the big ball of mud is that there are no meaningful divisions in the code. Everything uses everything willy-nilly, at the smallest possible level of abstraction. There is, metaphorically if not always entirely literally, not a single line of code in the system that you can change without fear of bringing something else down that you may not have even known they existed.

Microservices are not a miracle cure or the solution to every problem, but they do force divisions within the code base. Every microservice defines an interface for its input and its output. It may be the sloppiest, crappiest definition every, with dynamic types and ill-defined APIs and bizarre side effects, but it is some sort of definition, and that means if necessary, the entire microservice could be entirely replaced with some new chunk of code without affecting the rest of the system, cleanly cut along the API lines. This microservice may sloppily call dozens of others, but that can be seen and replicated. It may be called by a sloppy combination of other services, but the incoming API could be replicated.

However bad the architecture of the microservice may be, however bad the overall architecture of the microservice-based system as a whole may be, this will be true by structural necessity. The network layer defines some sort of module.

They can create big balls of spaghetti, certainly. They can in total create a big mess; they are not magical architectural magic by any means. While a full replacement of a given microservice is practical and possible, if the boundaries are not drawn correctly to start with, fixing that can be much harder in a microservice architecture (with corresponding separation of teams) than a monolith.

But they fail to create the situation that is what I would consider the distinguishing characteristic of a "Big Ball of Mud", where there are no partitions between anything at all. Big Balls of Mud have no equivalent of "replace this microservice". Microservices by necessity, to be "microservices", have partitions.

Re: Microservices are hard

#79

Post by strken »

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…

This post reads more like "I created an overengineered microservice architecture once and I'm now jaded because of my bad experiences." See "10 years ago I wanted modules, but I as well found microservice architectures."

It's in the same genre as "I nearly wrapped myself around a tree and now I drive slowly when it's wet", not "I am perfect and everyone else is wrong."

Re: Microservices are hard

#80

Post by gfodor »

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…

You could say this about any criticism of mainstream practice. This is not a rebuttal and contains no new information.

Actually, I lied - this post is actually a strawman: it contains the information that you actually didn’t understand the point of the article. He is referring to people who have deployed microservices when they needed modules, not people who deployed microservices when they needed microservices.

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