5 ms·

Urgh, this feels familiar. Last year I left a company that was just wrapping up a new tech product, everything was microservices and mongodb. Trying to get a si

Urgh, this feels familiar. Last year I left a company that was just wrapping up a new tech product, everything was microservices and mongodb. Trying to get a simple answer out of the engineering team about something as trivial as “how can I get a list of customers who have purchased product X” was almost impossible. They sure had fun building it though.

threeseed 6y ago
What does that even remotely have to do with micro-services or MongoDB ? If your query was exposed as a REST API you could have easily accessed it via a micro-service. And MongoDB has a pretty powerful and easy to use query language. I could've answered your query in about 5s. Sounds more like a business or process limitation.
- iamacyborg 6y ago
  Just a generalised frustration that the technology team didn’t seem to understand how the rest of the business needed the technology to behave. The reality is you don’t need that sort of query exposed as an API, but you do need that data to be exported regularly into a CRM and marketing automation tools.
- satyrnein 6y ago
  It seems like you're assuming the data you need is all in one microservice. (In which case, why did you need microservices?) Let's say the report needs data from across two microservices, one is backed by mongodb and one is mysql, and both services have been crud endpoints but not ones that will give you the full data you need. This is a pretty typical scenario! So you could make new endpoints, but then you still need to "join" the data in code. Or you could set up data pipelines to sync data into into a data warehouse, where you query across everything. Or you could have kept everything in a monolith, and this would have actually been a 5 second SQL query.
  - gaogao 6y ago
    Still a 5 second SQL query with Presto or similar and a warehouse.
    - thedevelopnik 6y ago
      But now you need to build an ETL system and run a data warehouse. And you need a team of people who know how to build and maintain those.
andrewflnr 6y ago
In the event you haven't already seen it, you may find this skit amusing and/or sob-inducing. https://youtu.be/y8OnoxKotPQ https://youtu.be/y8OnoxKotPQ Ed: I'm an idiot.
- oblio 6y ago
  Link?
  - andrewflnr 6y ago
    Fixed. Oops!

threeseed 6y ago

What does that even remotely have to do with micro-services or MongoDB ? If your query was exposed as a REST API you could have easily accessed it via a micro-service. And MongoDB has a pretty powerful and easy to use query language. I could've answered your query in about 5s. Sounds more like a business or process limitation.

iamacyborg 6y ago
Just a generalised frustration that the technology team didn’t seem to understand how the rest of the business needed the technology to behave. The reality is you don’t need that sort of query exposed as an API, but you do need that data to be exported regularly into a CRM and marketing automation tools.
satyrnein 6y ago
It seems like you're assuming the data you need is all in one microservice. (In which case, why did you need microservices?) Let's say the report needs data from across two microservices, one is backed by mongodb and one is mysql, and both services have been crud endpoints but not ones that will give you the full data you need. This is a pretty typical scenario! So you could make new endpoints, but then you still need to "join" the data in code. Or you could set up data pipelines to sync data into into a data warehouse, where you query across everything. Or you could have kept everything in a monolith, and this would have actually been a 5 second SQL query.
- gaogao 6y ago
  Still a 5 second SQL query with Presto or similar and a warehouse.
  - thedevelopnik 6y ago
    But now you need to build an ETL system and run a data warehouse. And you need a team of people who know how to build and maintain those.

andrewflnr 6y ago

In the event you haven't already seen it, you may find this skit amusing and/or sob-inducing. https://youtu.be/y8OnoxKotPQ https://youtu.be/y8OnoxKotPQ Ed: I'm an idiot.

oblio 6y ago
Link?
- andrewflnr 6y ago
  Fixed. Oops!