6 ms·

Speaking as a young engineer, I can tell you many are already looking past microservices towards things like AWS Lambda, AMQs, and BaaS, which make a great deal

by sp527 10y ago

Speaking as a young engineer, I can tell you many are already looking past microservices towards things like AWS Lambda, AMQs, and BaaS, which make a great deal more sense. Why? Because it helps reduce dev effort down to purely the logic you'd have to write no matter what, with better guarantees about reliability and scalability, and less maintenance. I hesitate to say 'serverless' because that still feels somewhat out of reach, but that's the direction things are trending towards. I also get the sense that a lot of purists moulded in the ways of yore are alarmed at the waning relevance of their skillset. This to me seems like a bigger problem than the evolution of software paradigms.

dasil003 10y ago
Oh yeah, I don't think it's bad research going into this. I mean I've been writing software professionally for almost 20 years now and I am super excited about (for example) containerization and other trendy areas. I think it's great that people are pushing the boundaries of SOAs, and I think microservice is a good term describing how the boundaries are being pushed. We will all benefit from the improved tooling and experience gained. My only complaint is this ostrich mentality of declaring ubiquity and ignoring the downsides and unsuitable cases. I suppose drinking the koolaid might be necessary to really buy in and push the paradigm forward, but sometimes it feels like willful ignorance.
- sp527 10y ago
  I agree completely. I may simply have had the luxury of so far working in environments wherein software fads aren't hailed as Swiss-Army panaceas. Here's to hoping my track record doesn't ever trend Dilbertesque :)
  - dasil003 10y ago
    Me too. At this point in my career I've worked very closely with more than 100 programmers for long periods of time, and only one of them would I classify as being overly interested in fads. To the contrary, I give a ton of credit to the vast majority of programmers as always being pragmatic about the problem at hand. I think the problem lies more in the PR, advocacy and conference circuits where there's an incentive and agenda to present things as silver bullets. It mirrors a greater problem in public discourse that everything has become so polarized that nuanced debate is drowned out by noisy, confident blowhards.
    - sp527 10y ago
      "The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt." (Bertrand Russell) Back when I was still an employee, I strove to take a more intermediate tact that let me be more vocal about technical direction. What's surprising is how willingly people with authority will listen to what you have to say, once they realize you know what you're doing. I've also been fortunate to have had roles that enabled that in the first place. And now I'm trying my hand at entrepreneurship, which feels practically utopian :)
xyzzy123 10y ago
I think this is a smaller evolution than microservices / non microservices.... as others have pointed out, the real discussion is autonomy versus centralised control.
- sp527 10y ago
  If that's the case, I'd argue we're conflating software development management with software engineering execution. It's illogical to assert that utilizing microservices implies entirely forgoing centralization.
  - xyzzy123 10y ago
    I agree with you. In my defense, people who want microservices are generally asking for developer autonomy, but just using technical language to do it, rather than managerial.
    - sp527 10y ago
      I can believe that. This is why it's so crucial to have good management. I've also realized through my own experience that a good manager has to be in the trenches coding with his/her reports, at least part of the time. It's amazing how fast you can become irrelevant when you're unplugged and stuff like this is exactly why.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
estefan 10y ago
> AWS Lambda Has local dev/testing been solved for that yet, and different environments, etc?
- sp527 10y ago
  Getting there. Wrapping Lambda functions for local execution isn't too hard since it's really just JS. e.g. https://www.npmjs.com/package/node-lambda https://www.npmjs.com/package/node-lambda
allengeorge 10y ago
While I appreciate the allure of such models, one point gives me pause: tracing and debugging. Maybe the tools have caught up to the point where tracing why a job wasn't triggered or failed in the middle is a simple task, but it always seemed tedious to me. My hope is that the explosion of the microservice framework will trigger a corresponding explosion in the tools to trace/debug it.
djspoons 10y ago
Yeah, we were debating about whether I should write a post about "the end of servers" instead of "the end of microservices." I thought we'd get a livelier discussion with microservices, ;) but I totally agree that they are already getting to be yesterday's buzz word.

by sp527 10y ago

dasil003 10y ago

Oh yeah, I don't think it's bad research going into this. I mean I've been writing software professionally for almost 20 years now and I am super excited about (for example) containerization and other trendy areas. I think it's great that people are pushing the boundaries of SOAs, and I think microservice is a good term describing how the boundaries are being pushed. We will all benefit from the improved tooling and experience gained. My only complaint is this ostrich mentality of declaring ubiquity and ignoring the downsides and unsuitable cases. I suppose drinking the koolaid might be necessary to really buy in and push the paradigm forward, but sometimes it feels like willful ignorance.

sp527 10y ago
I agree completely. I may simply have had the luxury of so far working in environments wherein software fads aren't hailed as Swiss-Army panaceas. Here's to hoping my track record doesn't ever trend Dilbertesque :)
- dasil003 10y ago
  Me too. At this point in my career I've worked very closely with more than 100 programmers for long periods of time, and only one of them would I classify as being overly interested in fads. To the contrary, I give a ton of credit to the vast majority of programmers as always being pragmatic about the problem at hand. I think the problem lies more in the PR, advocacy and conference circuits where there's an incentive and agenda to present things as silver bullets. It mirrors a greater problem in public discourse that everything has become so polarized that nuanced debate is drowned out by noisy, confident blowhards.
  - sp527 10y ago
    "The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt." (Bertrand Russell) Back when I was still an employee, I strove to take a more intermediate tact that let me be more vocal about technical direction. What's surprising is how willingly people with authority will listen to what you have to say, once they realize you know what you're doing. I've also been fortunate to have had roles that enabled that in the first place. And now I'm trying my hand at entrepreneurship, which feels practically utopian :)

xyzzy123 10y ago

I think this is a smaller evolution than microservices / non microservices.... as others have pointed out, the real discussion is autonomy versus centralised control.

sp527 10y ago
If that's the case, I'd argue we're conflating software development management with software engineering execution. It's illogical to assert that utilizing microservices implies entirely forgoing centralization.
- xyzzy123 10y ago
  I agree with you. In my defense, people who want microservices are generally asking for developer autonomy, but just using technical language to do it, rather than managerial.
  - sp527 10y ago
    I can believe that. This is why it's so crucial to have good management. I've also realized through my own experience that a good manager has to be in the trenches coding with his/her reports, at least part of the time. It's amazing how fast you can become irrelevant when you're unplugged and stuff like this is exactly why.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

estefan 10y ago

> AWS Lambda Has local dev/testing been solved for that yet, and different environments, etc?

sp527 10y ago
Getting there. Wrapping Lambda functions for local execution isn't too hard since it's really just JS. e.g. https://www.npmjs.com/package/node-lambda https://www.npmjs.com/package/node-lambda

allengeorge 10y ago

While I appreciate the allure of such models, one point gives me pause: tracing and debugging. Maybe the tools have caught up to the point where tracing why a job wasn't triggered or failed in the middle is a simple task, but it always seemed tedious to me. My hope is that the explosion of the microservice framework will trigger a corresponding explosion in the tools to trace/debug it.

djspoons 10y ago

Yeah, we were debating about whether I should write a post about "the end of servers" instead of "the end of microservices." I thought we'd get a livelier discussion with microservices, ;) but I totally agree that they are already getting to be yesterday's buzz word.