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>...you get big enough that microservices is actually a win. Can you speak more about the criteria here? You may be implying that microservices enforce Conway

>...you get big enough that microservices is actually a win. Can you speak more about the criteria here? You may be implying that microservices enforce Conway's law. If so then when the monolith divides, it "gives away" some of it's API to another name, such that the new node has it's own endpoints. This named set is adopted by a team, and evolves separately from that point on, according to cost/revenue. The team and its microservice form a semi-autonomous unit, in theory able to evolve faster in relative isolation from the original. The problem from the capital perspective is that you get a bazillion bespoke developer experiences, all good and bad in their unique and special ways, which means that the personal dev experience will matter, a guide in the wilderness who's lived there for years. The more tools are required to run a typical DX, the more tightly coupled the service will be to the developers who built it. This generally favors the developer, which may also explain why the architecture is popular.

jedberg 5y ago
The first part of your comment is accurate (and beautifully poetic). But I don't believe the second part follows from the first. At most companies that do microservices well, they have a dedicated platform team that builds tools specifically for building microservices. This includes things like deployment, canaries, data storage, data pipelines, caching, libraries for service discovery and connections, etc. This leaves the teams building the services focusing on business logic while having similar developer experiences. The code might use different conventions internally and even different languages, but they all interact with the larger ecosystem in the same way, so that devs at the company can move around to different services with ease, and onboarding is similar throughout.
- javajosh 5y ago
  >they all interact with the larger ecosystem in the same way, so that devs at the company can move around to different services with ease, and onboarding is similar throughout. But big enterprises inevitably lose "stack coherence" over time, through drift but also acquisitions. Finding the lowest common denomenator to operate and modify it all, while maintaining a high level of service (uptime, security, data integrity, privacy, value), turns out to be a tricky problem - just defining the product categories is a tricky problem! Well I for one would love to see such a thing properly functioning. I've seen two attempts, but neither were successful.
  - lupire 5y ago
    Stack coherence is even worse when your dependencies are all different companies!

jedberg 5y ago

The first part of your comment is accurate (and beautifully poetic). But I don't believe the second part follows from the first. At most companies that do microservices well, they have a dedicated platform team that builds tools specifically for building microservices. This includes things like deployment, canaries, data storage, data pipelines, caching, libraries for service discovery and connections, etc. This leaves the teams building the services focusing on business logic while having similar developer experiences. The code might use different conventions internally and even different languages, but they all interact with the larger ecosystem in the same way, so that devs at the company can move around to different services with ease, and onboarding is similar throughout.

javajosh 5y ago
>they all interact with the larger ecosystem in the same way, so that devs at the company can move around to different services with ease, and onboarding is similar throughout. But big enterprises inevitably lose "stack coherence" over time, through drift but also acquisitions. Finding the lowest common denomenator to operate and modify it all, while maintaining a high level of service (uptime, security, data integrity, privacy, value), turns out to be a tricky problem - just defining the product categories is a tricky problem! Well I for one would love to see such a thing properly functioning. I've seen two attempts, but neither were successful.
- lupire 5y ago
  Stack coherence is even worse when your dependencies are all different companies!