5 ms·

I understand how microsercices work, but I'm referring to a specific kind of antipattern where an application is arbitrarily atomized into many small services i

• Joeri 6y ago
  Assuming every function is called the same amount of times and carries the same cost it would indeed be silly to cut up a system like that. But in the real world some parts of the system are called more often or carry a high cost of the execution. If you can scale those independently of the rest of the system, that is a definite advantage. For me the antipattern poses itself when the cutting up into microservices is done as a general practice, without a clearly defined goal for each service to need to be separate. (And by the way, i’ve seen a talk before of an application where the entire backend was functions in a function store, exactly as you described. The developer was enthusiastic about that architecture.)
• Chris_Newton 6y ago
  This seems to be an example of a more general antipattern in software development, where a relatively large entity is broken down into multiple smaller entities for dogmatic reasons. The usual justification given is how much simpler each individual entity now is, glossing over the extra complexity introduced by integrating all of those separate entities. Microservice architectures seem to be a recurring example of this phenomenon. Separating medium to long functions into shorter ones based on arbitrary metrics like line count or nesting depth is another.