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Is there any place for monoliths in 2021? (2020)

fjrevoredo.me

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Re: Is there any place for monoliths in 2021? (2020)

#3
It really depends on the framework being used. Some frameworks are essentially micro-in-monolith (Akka) and some encourage the microservice framework (Federated Apollo GraphQL) due to their use case.

I think it ultimately it depends on the tools being used and the team building them because there's tradeoffs to going each way.

Re: Is there any place for monoliths in 2021? (2020)

#5
Many of the points in this article are entirely a matter of implementation, not inherent to or ingrained in any particular architectural choice.

You can just as easily build a highly modular and decoupled monolith as you can a tightly coupled and fragile microservice. The same point holds true for many of the other pro/cons the author brought up.

Re: Is there any place for monoliths in 2021? (2020)

#6
> Developers always want to try the new flashy things [...] On the other hand, management mostly sees risks .. mostly wants new fancy features

I have the inverse experience: management wants to brag about tech and therefore force ill-suited tech onto the developers.

I've had managers that wants a CDN because that's what all professionals do and they don't take a moment to think about added risk by adding more components to the system (or even if it adds any benefit at all).

Re: Is there any place for monoliths in 2021? (2020)

#8

Microservices Pros: Code reusability? Please ELI5 how I get better code reuseability in microservices than in my monolith with separated concerns into libraries and helper modules.

I think the idea is that if you only need for an external tool one service you don't need the whole thing.

Re: Is there any place for monoliths in 2021? (2020)

#9
microservices: let's take the hardest problem in software construction, factoring the system properly, and introduce network connections and deployment complexity into it.

yeah, there's a place for monoliths, and developers who are willing to ignore the industries ludicrous fads and faang-chasing have the advantage.

Re: Is there any place for monoliths in 2021? (2020)

#10
> If we analyze most of the successful migrations into microservices, they were driven almost exclusively from necessity rather than preference.

This is basically how everything should work. There's no need to rush things if you don't need it now, especially that some that do convert are disappointed at the results (it's not the microservices themselves, it's the specific migration planning, design, and maintenance.)

> So maybe there’s no point in keep discussing microservices vs monoliths.

Wikimedia has monoliths for text-based systems and microservices for (some) media-based systems, and it make sense: transcoding is unpredictable workload (for them, I imagine this is more common for YouTube) while database operations (at Wikipedia's scale) is very predictable and doesn't warrant the additional complexity. Even in their planning for multi-datacenter operations (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Performance_Team/Ac...), they are more concerned with disaster recovery and slowness to logged-in users, not quick scalability.

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