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I've found there's a happy middleground. You need medium-sized-services that still share code libraries. For many companies, this is often 7 or 8. The key is to

I've found there's a happy middleground. You need medium-sized-services that still share code libraries. For many companies, this is often 7 or 8. The key is to combine like business units/features, not necessarily fragmenting at every visible code boundary. A deployed "service" can really just be several HTTP paths and/or gRPC services in one repo. You still get to keep decent separation of work, deployment, versioning, dev focus, etc with these medium sized services without sacrificing the benefits of larger, more centralized/shared reuse.

stult 7y ago
I’ve accidentally landed on an architecture like this and I’m actually pretty happy about it. It was driven by a desire to kill a large monolith slowly, by extracting key features into separate services. Sold to the customer as microservices because sexy fad of the moment. Our real motivation was we had way too much trouble recruiting in the monolith stack (.NET) and had a surplus of embedded C++, python, and JS engineers. Anyway, turns out our teams naturally self-organize around four or five domain+language clusters that effectively form separate services that are too large to really be micro, but too dissimilar to play nicely together in a monolith. Eg, python data science module wrapped in a Flask API providing physics calcs, legacy C# service providing simple data models via REST, JS react front end served from a separate node service, a weird C++/python hybrid used for an embedded device sim service, etc. It’s not what I planned as the tech lead/architect, but I think we organically reached what is really the best approach for our team. Definitely an element of Conway’s law in action, but in a good way. We are making the most of our organizational structure rather than fighting against it. Would this scale to google levels? No, probably not. But we don’t need it to, and it’s incredibly unlikely we ever would given our specific business.

stult 7y ago

I’ve accidentally landed on an architecture like this and I’m actually pretty happy about it. It was driven by a desire to kill a large monolith slowly, by extracting key features into separate services. Sold to the customer as microservices because sexy fad of the moment. Our real motivation was we had way too much trouble recruiting in the monolith stack (.NET) and had a surplus of embedded C++, python, and JS engineers. Anyway, turns out our teams naturally self-organize around four or five domain+language clusters that effectively form separate services that are too large to really be micro, but too dissimilar to play nicely together in a monolith. Eg, python data science module wrapped in a Flask API providing physics calcs, legacy C# service providing simple data models via REST, JS react front end served from a separate node service, a weird C++/python hybrid used for an embedded device sim service, etc. It’s not what I planned as the tech lead/architect, but I think we organically reached what is really the best approach for our team. Definitely an element of Conway’s law in action, but in a good way. We are making the most of our organizational structure rather than fighting against it. Would this scale to google levels? No, probably not. But we don’t need it to, and it’s incredibly unlikely we ever would given our specific business.