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I would say 99% of all articles on this site and r/programming on reddit have someone say exactly what you have - that microservices are an organizational tool.

by jzoch 6y ago

I would say 99% of all articles on this site and r/programming on reddit have someone say exactly what you have - that microservices are an organizational tool. At this point your view is not an unpopular one. However, microservices can also serve actual technical purposes too. But the nuances of accepting two viewpoints often placed in juxtaposition to one another is not internet friendly. Microservices, service oriented architecture, whatever you call it depends on your level of cynicism i suppose (or optimism?).

eightysixfour 6y ago
I agree, I don't think my view is unusual or controversial, which is why it surprises me that the writers of the blog posts that get submitted to here or on r/programming rarely acknowledge both the technical and organizational aspects. Just yesterday there was the article "Back to the '70s with Serverless" which compared smalltalk and its fast feedback loops to the complexity of cloud and serverless computing and argued it was about good marketing. So I will keep commenting that it isn't just about technical issues and it isn't just about organizational ones, and you must look at both to really understand what is going on. But I probably did get a little too excited that a technical post acknowledged and made it an important point in their article.
rualca 6y ago
> I would say 99% of all articles on this site and r/programming on reddit have someone say exactly what you have - that microservices are an organizational tool. At this point your view is not an unpopular one. Microservices have been from the start an organizational tool, with reliability and the ability to scale horizontally to avoid constraints of vertical scaling trailing at second place. The rationale is that the first bottleneck that is hit by a growing organization is developer's throughput (i.e., the ability to deploy bugfixes and features without hitting blockers due to multiple teams being affected by a changeset). After that point, a service has to grow a tad more until reaching a point where the requests bounded to a subset of features justifies peeling them out to independent services.

by jzoch 6y ago

eightysixfour 6y ago

I agree, I don't think my view is unusual or controversial, which is why it surprises me that the writers of the blog posts that get submitted to here or on r/programming rarely acknowledge both the technical and organizational aspects. Just yesterday there was the article "Back to the '70s with Serverless" which compared smalltalk and its fast feedback loops to the complexity of cloud and serverless computing and argued it was about good marketing. So I will keep commenting that it isn't just about technical issues and it isn't just about organizational ones, and you must look at both to really understand what is going on. But I probably did get a little too excited that a technical post acknowledged and made it an important point in their article.

rualca 6y ago

> I would say 99% of all articles on this site and r/programming on reddit have someone say exactly what you have - that microservices are an organizational tool. At this point your view is not an unpopular one. Microservices have been from the start an organizational tool, with reliability and the ability to scale horizontally to avoid constraints of vertical scaling trailing at second place. The rationale is that the first bottleneck that is hit by a growing organization is developer's throughput (i.e., the ability to deploy bugfixes and features without hitting blockers due to multiple teams being affected by a changeset). After that point, a service has to grow a tad more until reaching a point where the requests bounded to a subset of features justifies peeling them out to independent services.