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Jesus, 10 people on a team? What are you doing that you need 10 people to work on it? I manage like 8 services by myself.
by ohyes 9y ago
Jesus, 10 people on a team? What are you doing that you need 10 people to work on it? I manage like 8 services by myself.
- st3fan 9y agoWhy was this downvoted? I think this is a valid argument. There are plenty of small teams or individuals who have been managing a bunch of small services. Before this was called microservices.
- HelloMcFly 9y agoI downvoted because without context this just seems like the typical know-it-all statement from someone who has yet to realize how little they really know. There's no attempt to even try to appreciate how their situation may be different, just the default disdain so typical from some professionals incapable of thinking outside of their own perspective.
- foo101 9y agoI think the context is pretty clear: microservices. If it takes 10 people to manage one service, it is not a microservice by definition. It is more like a 10x-microservice or a macroservice.
- JamesBarney 9y agoWhile 10 is more than many recommend it's not that much more than Amazon's rule of < 7.
- zimpenfish 9y agoI suppose it depends if those 10 people are purely developers or include the other teams you'd need - monitoring, devops, etc. For a critical, high-performance microservice, I can easily see it needing the involvement of 2+ devs (at least one senior), product owner, project manager, QA, devops, monitoring, etc.
- bonesss 9y agoIt's not the number of people that are micro, it's the scope of the service... So what is the right level of manpower for a scoped service with unspecified operational demands? Unknowable. The definition isn't small teams, per se, it's a small area of responsibility with singular focus. A lego block instead of duplo. That lends itself very well to small teams, but you could reasonably have 100 people working on a service and call it "micro". Reason being: if those 100 people weren't working on their scoped 'microservice' they would be part of a much, much, much larger pool working on the shared 'product', 'platform', or 'service' that contains that exact same functionality, only without the clarity/scalability of application boundaries surrounding the individual service components. That's not to say microservices are ideal, just that the size of "micro" is highly relative to ongoing operations.
- Clubber 9y ago10 people managing a single "micro service" does raise a red flag to me as well. It may be normal based on the complexity, but my first thought is, why is the codebase require so many people to maintain and add features to? Are they just adding features like mad, or something squirrelly in there where most modifications take a lot of man hours?
- jblow 9y agoHow micro can it possibly be if it takes 10 people to deal with it? Seriously.
- BatFastard 9y agoCause it's not very micro?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- sbov 9y agoThe scope of a microservice is commonly a bounded context in DDD. So depending upon the problem you might be talking about a lot of code.
- snowwrestler 9y agoIf "micro" refers to the scope of the service (i.e. very limited feature set), you might still need a team to run it, if the service has to handle a very high volume of transactions or provide very low latency, or both.
- sameline 9y agoIt’s not unreasonable to imagine that any of the examples provided in the source post could require a team larger than 10 people.
- bonesss 9y ago"Micro" in this case relates to the services scope, not its operational footprint. So if Netflix has a "User logon" service, and a "payment processing" service, used across their clients clients you might be looking at a couple of "microservice"s with hundreds of related employees. Imagine services for Googles search autocomplete, ML, or analytics... As the article states the "micro" aspect is mostly in terms of deployment responsibility, freeing those 10-1000 employees from thinking about the totality of Googles/Netflixes' operations before rolling out a patch :)
- jiggunjer 9y agoI think he is literally asking for the other perspective? "I run 8 services myself" can be read as arrogant, OR it can be read as "I do things very differently", which is how I read it initially.
- ohyes 9y agoThat’s how I meant it, that the advantage of microservices is bite size pieces of work, so 10 people on the same service sounds like they’d step on each other’s toes. I run a bunch of services but they’re each debugged enough to be fairly low maintenance and small enough that the edges are well defined. It’s 8 or so but it’s possible for me to handle it all. If we add features they’re going to be new services, so adding big features to the services I manage is unlikely. It is more likely that I get a new service on my plate in 6 months time than getting additional members of the engineering team to work on already completed services. I’m obviously not entirely alone... I’ll ask for help if I need it, and I help out with other people’s stuff too, but I am primarily in charge of them and I am responsible for keeping everything working well.
- adbachman 9y agoBecause it's not a "valid argument", it's snark. The contempt is unnecessary and uninformed.
- ohyes 9y agoIt’s not snark, it’s also not any argument. It’s genuine incredulity. I seriously cannot imagine the situation where 10 people work on the same minimal function piece of code.
- always_good 9y agoWell, I've also worked for places where I'm on call for some service maintained by one person that's built their little impregnable abstraction castle because nobody else had to work on it so they could just yak-shave and bike-shed with their self. These days I kinda wince at "I run 8 services myself."
- jblow 9y agoThose of us who have been around since the 80s-90s are astonished by the low productivity of today's programmers. If it takes 1 person to run 1 microservice, we are all doomed.
- spraak 9y agoYou really think that the productivity of today's programmers is less? What evidence and data do you have for that?
- eggsqqq 9y agoYou must be the life of every party.
- nurettin 9y agoWarning: all anecdotes. While I don't think that productivity has decreased, what was notepad, a compiler, some dlls and a debugger before turned into a thousand little packages, several configuration files, a bunch of servers you have to run on your dev. computer, which is also 10x more capable, yet everything feels so sluggish. I also feel that ceteris paribus, the meetings got longer, project management tools now consume a lot of input from programmers, and I need to communicate with a lot more people to get something done.
- mauritzio 9y agoSounds for me like productivity went down...
- anfedorov 9y agoThat's nothing. I once ran 20 services before breakfast.
- paulddraper 9y agoWell, my pre-breakfast routine consists of seq 21 | while read port; do python2 -m SimpleHTTPServer 80$port & done
- majewsky 9y agoseq 21 | while read port; do python3 -m http.server 80$port & done FTFY
- nstj 9y agoPutting the I back in Microservices :)
- NicoJuicy 9y agoI have a web app with a "file store" ( eg. simple dropbox over API) that i manage. I haven't touched it in a year and it uploads files, proxies them, resizes, ... And it's just one of many.
- isaacremuant 9y agoI get both why people downvoted you and why people defended you. One developer can certainly be responsible for coding many microservices and even maintaining them depending on the scope, number of users, etc. Sometimes people might even rotate with a core architect coordinating how they all interact and if they are consistent with each other. Discussing about microservices can be very confusing if people are thinking about different things and, as always, when there's a good idea implemented in a specific context and people who don't use it get exposed to it as a silver bullet we'll end up with a huge backlash like in this article.
- hajile 9y agoReal-world business servers are complicated even when you tease apart the different elements.