5 ms·
All these architectural discussions seem to assume a kind of black box business system where the microservices vs monolith discussion is an internal one, conduc
by abraae 10y ago
All these architectural discussions seem to assume a kind of black box business system where the microservices vs monolith discussion is an internal one, conducted by and for techies, and limited to a rigid view of the business requirements.
Perhaps the early microservices evangelizers such as Netflix have created this environment - after all, who cares whether Netflix is a monolith or a swarm of microservices as long as billing works and users get content when they want?
There's another strong driver for microservices however, which is customer choice, particularly in SaaS settings.
In our industry (HR software), there is no one right answer, or one business problem - customers demand choice, every customer has slightly different needs, and microservices are indicated because they allow customers to pick and choose. The same is true for most SaaS areas I would say.
As an example, one tiny sub-area of HR software, employee engagement improves when we offer employees meaningful benefits. It turns out that many employees love their pets, and offering pet insurance could be a great perk (the HR space is so big that just this niche within a niche could be a multi-million dollar opportunity for someone with a good offering).
Yet would anyone seriously consider altering a monolithic HR application to add pet insurance management? Never. The only viable solution is a microservice, that does just this, and does it well, and plugs into the rest of the stack via APIs.
tl;dr: in the SaaS world, microservices are sometimes indicated not for architectural reasons, but to support customer choice, which is far more important.
- empthought 10y agoI think what you have there is a monolithic HR application and a smaller monolithic pet insurance application that exchange information via enterprise integration, not a microservice architecture.
- abraae 10y agoI don't usually find arguing over names to be productive. Your "smaller monolithic" application is my microservice. What's in a name? But as a customer, if I have a HR app from vendor A, and then I want to add a pet insurance app from vendor B, the last thing I want to do is to roll out some creaky enterprise integration process/framework/product. If those products work together via APIs why should I take any of the burden of integration?
- empthought 10y agoWhat's in a name? Microservices are fine-grained and operate on a single bounded context, where applications typically have coarser-grained interfaces and involve multiple contexts. I suppose if your pet insurance system were only to provide a constrained list of values of pet insurance products, and provide an interface to associate them with a user ID from the HR monolith, then it's a microservice. (Of course, you've pushed off the integration with the _actual_ pet insurance app somewhere else, but that might be OK.) "APIs" are an enterprise integration technique [1]. There's nothing inherently creaky or frameworkey about them. [1] http://www.enterpriseintegrationpatterns.com/patterns/messaging/ComposedMessagingWS.html http://www.enterpriseintegrationpatterns.com/patterns/messag...
- stuartaxelowen 10y ago"Microservices are just tiny monoliths" - gasp
- empthought 10y agoThey're not, though. sed is a microservice. Emacs is a monolith. Sed is not a tiny emacs.
- parenthephobia 10y agoNobody said it was: sed is a tiny perl.
- arglwarg 10y agosed is maximum viable perl. Well maybe awk, but that is pushing it.
- vitalus 10y ago> Yet would anyone seriously consider altering a monolithic HR application to add pet insurance management? Never. Sure they might? I can't see a category of business features that would naturally lend themselves to being microservices rather than extended features of a monolith unless there was some real technical challenge that was otherwise more easily solved by being in a microservice.
- nine_k 10y agoThe challenge can be non-technical. The tech can be trivial, the business know-how, key.
- qaq 10y agocalling something over http vs calling functions or class methods does not make much difference. So in your example how does it make it easier to add vs monolith? Monolith can have well defined modules and interfaces and microservices could be an entangled mess.
- nine_k 10y agoNo one owns the whole stack. You pick your "main" software, and customize it with third-party services. None of it runs on your premises. No party is willing to expose much more than an API.
- qaq 10y ago"No one owns the whole stack" - depending on the nature of what you are integrating this can either speed things up or slow things down "You pick your "main" software, and customize it with third-party services" - not much difference monolith vs microservices "None of it runs on your premises" - totaly unrelated to monolith vs microservices "No party is willing to expose much more than an API" - again consuming an API can actually be easier in monolith vs microservices
- sbov 10y agoIt seems like you're talking about a plugin architecture, not necessarily microservices. Microservices could be a way to implement it. Not all systems built with microservices could support a plugin like that, not all plugins need to use microservices, and even if you do you might have to write some form of adapter to integrate someone else's service with your system. E.g. most video games support stuff like this, but they definitely don't use microservices.
- brianwawok 10y agoYes, is this a joke? You need a microservices to offer pet insurance? Pretty sure you could do it with a new view and an if statement in any MVC every built...