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Twitter seems to have adopted Microservices in 2014, and in 2013 they had ~200M MAU (presumably using a monolith architecture). Even if Microservices are bette

by zffr 4y ago

Twitter seems to have adopted Microservices in 2014, and in 2013 they had ~200M MAU (presumably using a monolith architecture). Even if Microservices are better for scale, most companies will never experience the level of scale of 2013 Twitter. Are Microservices beneficial at much smaller levels of scale? Ex: 1M MAU

AlchemistCamp 4y ago
Github got absolutely enormous as a Rails monolith, plus some C extensions in a few hot paths.
- zffr 4y ago
  From what I can tell, Github transitioned over to micro-services ~2020 (https://www.infoq.com/presentations/github-rails-monolith-microservices/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/github-rails-monolith-mi...). By this point it had already grew to a scale that very few companies will ever reach. I'm not sure at what point the monolith codebase became absolutely enormous, but I would bet that GitHub grew to 1M active users with a monolith just fine. Micro-services might be necessary for the companies like Github, Twitter, Google that grow to be huge, but monoliths seem to work just fine for the vast majority of other companies.
codethief 4y ago
> most companies will never experience the level of scale of 2013 Twitter I fully agree with your argument. Then again, as mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, microservices are often not introduced to solve a scalability problem but an organizational one and there are many organizations that have more engineers than Twitter (had). Personally, I still don't buy that argument because by solving one organizational problem one risks creating a different one, as this blog post[0] illustrates: > […] Uber has grown to around 2,200 critical microservices Unsurprisingly, that same post notes that > […] in recent years people have begun to decry microservices for their tendency to greatly increase complexity, sometimes making even trivial features difficult to build. […] we experienced these tradeoffs first hand I'm getting very strong Wingman/Galactus[1] vibes here. [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20221105153616/https://www.uber.com/blog/microservice-architecture/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221105153616/https://www.uber.... [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ

by zffr 4y ago

AlchemistCamp 4y ago

Github got absolutely enormous as a Rails monolith, plus some C extensions in a few hot paths.

zffr 4y ago
From what I can tell, Github transitioned over to micro-services ~2020 (https://www.infoq.com/presentations/github-rails-monolith-microservices/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/github-rails-monolith-mi...). By this point it had already grew to a scale that very few companies will ever reach. I'm not sure at what point the monolith codebase became absolutely enormous, but I would bet that GitHub grew to 1M active users with a monolith just fine. Micro-services might be necessary for the companies like Github, Twitter, Google that grow to be huge, but monoliths seem to work just fine for the vast majority of other companies.

codethief 4y ago

> most companies will never experience the level of scale of 2013 Twitter I fully agree with your argument. Then again, as mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, microservices are often not introduced to solve a scalability problem but an organizational one and there are many organizations that have more engineers than Twitter (had). Personally, I still don't buy that argument because by solving one organizational problem one risks creating a different one, as this blog post[0] illustrates: > […] Uber has grown to around 2,200 critical microservices Unsurprisingly, that same post notes that > […] in recent years people have begun to decry microservices for their tendency to greatly increase complexity, sometimes making even trivial features difficult to build. […] we experienced these tradeoffs first hand I'm getting very strong Wingman/Galactus[1] vibes here. [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20221105153616/https://www.uber.com/blog/microservice-architecture/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221105153616/https://www.uber.... [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ