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> Most people think a micro-service architecture is a panacea because "look at how simple X is," but it's not that simple. It's now a distributed system, and ve

> Most people think a micro-service architecture is a panacea because "look at how simple X is," but it's not that simple. It's now a distributed system, and very likely, it's a the worst-of-the-worst a distributed monolith. Distributed system are hard, I know, I do it. This line of argument fails to take into consideration any of the reasons why in general microservices are the right tool for the right job. Yes, it's challenging, and yes it's a distributes system. Yet, with microservices you actually are able to reuse specialized code, software packages, and even third-party services. That cuts down on a lot of dev time and cost, and makes the implementation of a lot of of POCs or even MVPs a trivial task. Take for example Celery. With Celery all you need to do to implement a queuable background task system that's trivially scalable is to write the background tasks, get a message broker up and running, launch worker instances, and that's it. What would you have to do to achieve the same goal with a monolith? Implement your own producer/consumer that runs on the same instance that serves requests? And aren't you actually developing a distributes system anyway?

ar_lan 7y ago
I'm completely in your camp, and I'm surprised by the lack of nuance HN seems to show (especially regarding micro-services & Kubernetes). There are many benefits to having microservices that people seem to forget because they think that everyone interested in microservices is interested in splitting their personal blog into 4 different services. They take coordination, good CICD, and a lot of forethought to ensure each service is cooperating in the ecosystem properly, but once established, it can do wonders to dev productivity.
- sterlind 7y ago
  I can't tell if my project is a monolith or microservices, but it's going well so far. We use a single scalable database instance as a message broker and persistence source, and have a common framework implements distributed algorithms that every service uses to expose "OS-like" constructs (actor activation, persistent collections, workflows, Git etc. All communication is done through independent protocols.. there's not much coupling between protocols (except for common ones like "schedule this job on this device"), so it's not really a cobweb of dependencies, but everything relies on that single database. I think if the database gets too overloaded I'll partition certain tree nodes across multiple masters (this is feasible because the framework doesn't rely on a single timestream). With the level of shared code (the framework) and the single database, it's somewhat monolithic but the actors themselves are quite well-behaved and independent on top of it.
zzzeek 7y ago
> Take for example Celery. With Celery all you need to do to implement a queuable background task system that's trivially scalable is to write the background tasks, that's a little bit of a straw man because that's not the "microservice" architecture this post is talking about. I personally wouldn't call that a "microservice" architecture, I'd call it, "a background queue", although strictly speaking it can be described as such. what this post is talking about are multiple synchronous pieces of a business case being broken up over the http / process line for no other reason than "we're afraid of overarchitecting our model". This means, your app has some features like auth, billing, personalization, reporting. You start from day one writing all of these as separate HTTPD services rather than just a single application with a variety of endpoints. Even though these areas of functionality may be highly interrelated, you're terrified of breaking out the GOF, using inheritance, or ORMs, because you had some bad experience with that stuff. So instead you spend all your time writing services, spinning up containers, defining complex endpoints that you wouldn't otherwise need...all becuase you really want to live in a "flat" world. I'm not allowed to leak the details of auth into billing because there's a whole process boundary! whew, I'm safe. Never mind that you can have an architecture that is all separate process with HTTP requests in between, and convert it directly to a monolithic one with the same strict separation of concerns, you just get to lose the network latency and complex marshalling between the components.
- tacitusarc 7y ago
  Programmers are, by and large, quite bad at not breaking encapsulation when they're dealing with a monolith. Not their fault, really, but when management comes to you and says, hey, can't you get it done in just a day, we really need this, and you know you could if you just hacked through that particular isolation barrier just this once, and yeah it will create bad bugs if things change in a particular way in the future, but you'll leave a comment so it will be fine and this way you can go home and have an ipa and finish re-runs of that show you like so you break the rules just this once. And that only happens a few more times, and then slowly bit by bit things become intertwined and rigid, and then five years down the road when half the people have left and the team has grown and other teams use the project and are trying to commit code to it you have to go to management, hat in hand, sorry, we need to rewrite it from scratch to keep adding features, new and exciting and unexpected things happen when we change things in the current project. Independent services that create a coherent whole enforce isolation barriers. I don't believe in microservices. These things don't need to be micro. They can be just normal-sized services. I don't even particularly care internal to those barriers how bad things get. There are programmers that write shit I think is hot garbage and will cause all kinds of bugs as time goes on. But if they are confined to their space space, and they're solving their problem and are happy and making management happy then w/e. That piece of the whole will collapse and die eventually, but it won't take everything with it. It's just a piece, and it provided value for a while, so probably worth it from a business sense. But when you have a monolith? And Developer Dave and Programmer Pete tell Big Boss Bob that they could sure get that feature out quick if only it weren't for those pesky rules preventing them from putting in a few mutexes in that one module so they can just read some data directly from it, and boy wouldn't it that be swell? Well Big Boss Bob says we need to get this feature SHIPPED BOYES so buckle up and put in those mutexes, and now the fucking thread goes into a deadlock state every so often but it's really intermittent so you spend hours debugging the damn things and late nights because yeah features gotta ship but shit gotta work, and you trace it back to Developer Dave and Programmer Pete and their change but what do you do? Big Boss Bob said do it that way and what? You gonna whine to Director Dan about it? Is that gonna get you back your late night spend figuring out what was going on? Nah. Make systems that are just small that when people break them completely it doesn't mean the end of the world to throw it out and start over.
hashkb 7y ago
The understanding is your monolith may use third party services. Nobody is writing SQL engines here.
balfirevic 7y ago
> What would you have to do to achieve the same goal with a monolith? You would take Celery, get a message broker up and running and launch some worker instances.

ar_lan 7y ago

I'm completely in your camp, and I'm surprised by the lack of nuance HN seems to show (especially regarding micro-services & Kubernetes). There are many benefits to having microservices that people seem to forget because they think that everyone interested in microservices is interested in splitting their personal blog into 4 different services. They take coordination, good CICD, and a lot of forethought to ensure each service is cooperating in the ecosystem properly, but once established, it can do wonders to dev productivity.

sterlind 7y ago
I can't tell if my project is a monolith or microservices, but it's going well so far. We use a single scalable database instance as a message broker and persistence source, and have a common framework implements distributed algorithms that every service uses to expose "OS-like" constructs (actor activation, persistent collections, workflows, Git etc. All communication is done through independent protocols.. there's not much coupling between protocols (except for common ones like "schedule this job on this device"), so it's not really a cobweb of dependencies, but everything relies on that single database. I think if the database gets too overloaded I'll partition certain tree nodes across multiple masters (this is feasible because the framework doesn't rely on a single timestream). With the level of shared code (the framework) and the single database, it's somewhat monolithic but the actors themselves are quite well-behaved and independent on top of it.

zzzeek 7y ago

> Take for example Celery. With Celery all you need to do to implement a queuable background task system that's trivially scalable is to write the background tasks, that's a little bit of a straw man because that's not the "microservice" architecture this post is talking about. I personally wouldn't call that a "microservice" architecture, I'd call it, "a background queue", although strictly speaking it can be described as such. what this post is talking about are multiple synchronous pieces of a business case being broken up over the http / process line for no other reason than "we're afraid of overarchitecting our model". This means, your app has some features like auth, billing, personalization, reporting. You start from day one writing all of these as separate HTTPD services rather than just a single application with a variety of endpoints. Even though these areas of functionality may be highly interrelated, you're terrified of breaking out the GOF, using inheritance, or ORMs, because you had some bad experience with that stuff. So instead you spend all your time writing services, spinning up containers, defining complex endpoints that you wouldn't otherwise need...all becuase you really want to live in a "flat" world. I'm not allowed to leak the details of auth into billing because there's a whole process boundary! whew, I'm safe. Never mind that you can have an architecture that is all separate process with HTTP requests in between, and convert it directly to a monolithic one with the same strict separation of concerns, you just get to lose the network latency and complex marshalling between the components.

tacitusarc 7y ago
Programmers are, by and large, quite bad at not breaking encapsulation when they're dealing with a monolith. Not their fault, really, but when management comes to you and says, hey, can't you get it done in just a day, we really need this, and you know you could if you just hacked through that particular isolation barrier just this once, and yeah it will create bad bugs if things change in a particular way in the future, but you'll leave a comment so it will be fine and this way you can go home and have an ipa and finish re-runs of that show you like so you break the rules just this once. And that only happens a few more times, and then slowly bit by bit things become intertwined and rigid, and then five years down the road when half the people have left and the team has grown and other teams use the project and are trying to commit code to it you have to go to management, hat in hand, sorry, we need to rewrite it from scratch to keep adding features, new and exciting and unexpected things happen when we change things in the current project. Independent services that create a coherent whole enforce isolation barriers. I don't believe in microservices. These things don't need to be micro. They can be just normal-sized services. I don't even particularly care internal to those barriers how bad things get. There are programmers that write shit I think is hot garbage and will cause all kinds of bugs as time goes on. But if they are confined to their space space, and they're solving their problem and are happy and making management happy then w/e. That piece of the whole will collapse and die eventually, but it won't take everything with it. It's just a piece, and it provided value for a while, so probably worth it from a business sense. But when you have a monolith? And Developer Dave and Programmer Pete tell Big Boss Bob that they could sure get that feature out quick if only it weren't for those pesky rules preventing them from putting in a few mutexes in that one module so they can just read some data directly from it, and boy wouldn't it that be swell? Well Big Boss Bob says we need to get this feature SHIPPED BOYES so buckle up and put in those mutexes, and now the fucking thread goes into a deadlock state every so often but it's really intermittent so you spend hours debugging the damn things and late nights because yeah features gotta ship but shit gotta work, and you trace it back to Developer Dave and Programmer Pete and their change but what do you do? Big Boss Bob said do it that way and what? You gonna whine to Director Dan about it? Is that gonna get you back your late night spend figuring out what was going on? Nah. Make systems that are just small that when people break them completely it doesn't mean the end of the world to throw it out and start over.

hashkb 7y ago

The understanding is your monolith may use third party services. Nobody is writing SQL engines here.

balfirevic 7y ago

> What would you have to do to achieve the same goal with a monolith? You would take Celery, get a message broker up and running and launch some worker instances.