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At my current place of work we have 1 monolith and 2 "Micro-Serivces" Working in the monolith is fine, but running tests is slow because it is a giant rails a

by Tobani 6y ago

At my current place of work we have 1 monolith and 2 "Micro-Serivces" Working in the monolith is fine, but running tests is slow because it is a giant rails app that is 7+ years old. There is 1 "microservice" that does its thing and the few people who need to interact with it like it. the second microservice was created, deployed and abandoned. Now people want to move it into the core monolith. It is a distinct unit of functionality that doesn't really have any overlap with the core app. I'm going through and adding all of the tooling to this project because it enables us to solve a certain class of problem (Report generation) that the monolith can't do very well for a couple of reasons. Articles like this have fueled the fire to re-combine it but the pain points have nothing to do with this particular service being separate.

JamesBarney 6y ago
If it's working well why change it? If your co-workers argument is just "microservices bad" then obviously they are making a mistake. But in the general I've seen far more frequent inappropriate splitting of monoliths than inappropriate combining of microservices. (this is honestly the first time I've heard of it.)
- chrisan 6y ago
  I mean you admit it yourself, far too often the splitting off is inappropriate. Normally an inappropriate microsservices is a net negative over all that costs you money in the long run. Just because its working doesn't mean it is efficient. My last two "assimilations" where because one microservice was written in Java. The original guy left and no one (around the company) likes to touch Java (or pretend they don't know/do it) which means it was alaways me who had to update it. It was a very small service, likely why he thought small = micro! but it was about 3 hours of work in the monolith. Now anyone can update/contribute to it and not bug me every time The other was a microservice that only served the monolith. New features required the monolith to be updated in order to realize the new features.
  - JamesBarney 6y ago
    Makes total sense.
- Tobani 6y ago
  Honestly it doesn't work well now as a developer. It is about a week worth of work away from being a great developer experience. They'll come around. Honestly every time I have split out a separate service it is because the current state of affairs is bad and there is a distinct need. Those handful of things have been rock solid and needed very little attention, but it has been a last resort.

by Tobani 6y ago

JamesBarney 6y ago

If it's working well why change it? If your co-workers argument is just "microservices bad" then obviously they are making a mistake. But in the general I've seen far more frequent inappropriate splitting of monoliths than inappropriate combining of microservices. (this is honestly the first time I've heard of it.)

chrisan 6y ago
I mean you admit it yourself, far too often the splitting off is inappropriate. Normally an inappropriate microsservices is a net negative over all that costs you money in the long run. Just because its working doesn't mean it is efficient. My last two "assimilations" where because one microservice was written in Java. The original guy left and no one (around the company) likes to touch Java (or pretend they don't know/do it) which means it was alaways me who had to update it. It was a very small service, likely why he thought small = micro! but it was about 3 hours of work in the monolith. Now anyone can update/contribute to it and not bug me every time The other was a microservice that only served the monolith. New features required the monolith to be updated in order to realize the new features.
- JamesBarney 6y ago
  Makes total sense.
Tobani 6y ago
Honestly it doesn't work well now as a developer. It is about a week worth of work away from being a great developer experience. They'll come around. Honestly every time I have split out a separate service it is because the current state of affairs is bad and there is a distinct need. Those handful of things have been rock solid and needed very little attention, but it has been a last resort.