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There is one other reason I don't often see addressed for the push to microservices. This mostly pertains to government acquisitions, but any software contracte

There is one other reason I don't often see addressed for the push to microservices. This mostly pertains to government acquisitions, but any software contracted to enterprise customers faces the same issue. It's vendor diversification. It's very difficult to split contracts for a monolithic system between multiple contractors, which means you end up getting tied to one vendor. If you can decompose a large system into pieces that can be individually developed, tested, and deployed independent of another, you can split the contracts for developing each of those pieces between different contractors and there are many good reasons to want to do that, from the perspective of security, financial risk mitigation, encouraging competition, and just the basic principle that many minds tend to be better than one.

mumblemumble 6y ago
That cuts both ways. It's a great reason for government to want microservices, but it's also a great reason for contractors to never even present them with that option.
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  I once worked on a project (US DOD) that was basically a conversion from monolith to SOA. The contractors did, in fact, fight tooth and nail to keep it from happening because it would reduce their apparent value and necessity. USAF totally fucked up the management of it (at the time I was involved), other services had similar projects which had much better transitions. And for them it substantially reduced costs and decreased time-to-feature. USAF just seems dead set on using the old block release style (big bang releases every 12-60 months) which was at odds with the attempted conversion and helped the contractors persist their miserably awful architecture that practically ensured another few billion in revenue for them.
  - datavirtue 6y ago
    Nearly every substantive function with defense departments is conducted by contractors. Hence, all they know is waterfall because, precisely as you mention, it is easy for them to game more revenue. A LOT more revenue. Now picture one of these contractors being Boeing. They don't just sell military hardware. They sell the software and systems used to get ANY data out of that hardware. Wartime decisions are made based on that data.
- nonameiguess 6y ago
  Yeah, totally. I'm anonymous enough here and not going to out my former employer, but one of the things that turned me off and a reason I'm not there any more was finding email trails intentionally suppressing findings from trade studies suggesting the government could get applications deployed faster and cheaper if they didn't use the ridiculous giant framework we'd managed to rope them into years earlier.

mumblemumble 6y ago

That cuts both ways. It's a great reason for government to want microservices, but it's also a great reason for contractors to never even present them with that option.

Jtsummers 6y ago
I once worked on a project (US DOD) that was basically a conversion from monolith to SOA. The contractors did, in fact, fight tooth and nail to keep it from happening because it would reduce their apparent value and necessity. USAF totally fucked up the management of it (at the time I was involved), other services had similar projects which had much better transitions. And for them it substantially reduced costs and decreased time-to-feature. USAF just seems dead set on using the old block release style (big bang releases every 12-60 months) which was at odds with the attempted conversion and helped the contractors persist their miserably awful architecture that practically ensured another few billion in revenue for them.
- datavirtue 6y ago
  Nearly every substantive function with defense departments is conducted by contractors. Hence, all they know is waterfall because, precisely as you mention, it is easy for them to game more revenue. A LOT more revenue. Now picture one of these contractors being Boeing. They don't just sell military hardware. They sell the software and systems used to get ANY data out of that hardware. Wartime decisions are made based on that data.
nonameiguess 6y ago
Yeah, totally. I'm anonymous enough here and not going to out my former employer, but one of the things that turned me off and a reason I'm not there any more was finding email trails intentionally suppressing findings from trade studies suggesting the government could get applications deployed faster and cheaper if they didn't use the ridiculous giant framework we'd managed to rope them into years earlier.