6 ms·

''I am here to tell you: if you are running a software business and you aren't at, like, Google-tier scale, just throw it all in a monorepo.'' Google _is_ a mo

''I am here to tell you: if you are running a software business and you aren't at, like, Google-tier scale, just throw it all in a monorepo.'' Google _is_ a monorepo

BoorishBears 4y ago
It really paints a picture of the authors credentials to be making this declaration. All signs for the rest of the world point to the opposite conclusion: unless you're Google-scale, you don't have Google level resources. Google has more engineers working on developer experience than most companies will ever have period. And monorepos work best when workflows are carefully thought out with clever application specific tooling. - I think the author is probably working on a 1-10 developer project (and I'm leaning towards 1) and has confused the convenience with having things in reach when the entire system fits in your mind with the general benefits of a monorepo. I also wonder if they read any of the letters they linked too...
- dastbe 4y ago
  > All signs for the rest of the world point to the opposite conclusion: unless you're Google-scale, you don't have Google level resources. Google has more engineers working on developer experience than most companies will ever have period. I feel like this was true ~5 years ago, but these days the tooling around scaling monorepos is safely supporting O(100) developers without a lot of overhead. > And monorepos work best when workflows are carefully thought out with clever application specific tooling. I don't see any meaningful distinction with how well thought out workflows need to be between mono and polyrepo.
  - BoorishBears 4y ago
    > I don't see any meaningful distinction with how well thought out workflows need to be between mono and polyrepo. You completely failed to parse the sentence. The point being made isn't "well thought workflows are only for monorepos", that applies to the "needing clever application specific tooling" part. Vendoring/Versioning for discrete packages is a heavily invested in problem space for most tech stacks you'll come across. But if you build a monorepo and don't end up with a build system that takes on those responsibilities you end something that doesn't scale to even moderately large interconnected components. OP has such a tiny project that I'm not convinced they're even dealing with dependencies in a traditional sense. But well before you get to Google scale, you'll run into situations where you just want to change one thing and don't want to change every single downstream dependency which normally would have been isolated via a discrete package that doesn't have to change in lockstep. And then that exact same pain starts to exist for deployments and needs to be worked around. > I feel like this was true ~5 years ago, but these days the tooling around scaling monorepos is safely supporting O(100) developers without a lot of overhead. Nothing about the above has changed in the last 5 years, it's kind of the ground truth of monorepos via multiple repos: You're the first person I've ever seen imply monorepos don't offload complexity to tooling, even amongst proponents.
    - dastbe 4y ago
      > Vendoring/Versioning for discrete packages is a heavily invested in problem space for most tech stacks you'll come across. 100% disagree. The problem of "How do I define my dependencies and have a package manager reify that into a concrete set of versioned dependencies" may be a solved problem, but the tools for tracking dependencies across many repos and driving upgrades is neolithic. About the only company I've seen that does this well is Amazon, and they have yet to sell us version sets as a service. > OP has such a tiny project that I'm not convinced they're even dealing with dependencies in a traditional sense. But well before you get to Google scale, you'll run into situations where you just want to change one thing and don't want to change every single downstream dependency which normally would have been isolated via a discrete package that doesn't have to change in lockstep. And then that exact same pain starts to exist for deployments and needs to be worked around. As I alluded to above, the dual of this is that getting everyone to update their dependencies is orders of magnitude more difficult when you have a polyrepo setup, even if we're working under the ideal situation where repo setup is standardize to such a degree that a person can parachute into a repo and become effective within minutes. > Nothing about the above has changed in the last 5 years, it's kind of the ground truth of monorepos via multiple repos: You're the first person I've ever seen imply monorepos don't offload complexity to tooling, even amongst proponents. Both polyrepo and monorepo have complexity in scaling that is handled by their tooling. The difference historically is that OSS polyrepo tooling has been better and better integrated because that's just how most things are built in any language, but that has been improving over the past ~half decade * Bazel maintenance complexity has dropped precipitously, and many of the initial bottlenecks you hit with it have been solved in OSS. * If you're anti-bazel, gradle and cargo monorepo support is decently good. I believe the same is true in js these days, but I don't have hands-on experience * Services for managing monorepos like sourcegraph for codesearch or mergify for submit queue now exist that make it easy to adopt the patterns that work well at large companies. * Microsoft and others have invested in git to improve scalability of developing against large repos. * you have OSS tools like git-branchless that further improve the experience of working in a monorepo There are a bunch of companies in the O(100) - O(1000) developer range that are using this stuff and it works very well.
    - tylerhou 4y ago
      > But well before you get to Google scale, ... doesn't have to change in lockstep. Not updating dependencies is the equivalent of never brushing your teeth. Yes, you can ship code faster in the short term, but version skew will be a huge pain in the future. A little maintenance every day is preferable to ten root canals in a few years.
CobrastanJorji 4y ago
Yes, absolutely. Nonetheless, I think the author may be right, except that by "Google" they mean "large." This is a fundamental misunderstanding of just how large Google and its peers are. I think it's more interesting to consider three sizes. If you're small, everything will fit nicely in a monorepo. If you're large, you'll want lots of repos. There aren't really any off the shelf monorepo options that scale super well, so using a bunch of small repos is a great way to deal with the problem. Plus, you probably don't have a full time staff babysitting the source repos, so you want some isolation. If someone in another org is breaking stuff left and right, you don't want the other orgs to be affected. If you're GIGANTIC, monorepos are a pretty great option again. You'll probably have to build your own and then have a full time group of people maintain it, but that's not a huge problem for you because you're a gigantic tech company. You can set up an elaborate build system that takes advantage of the fact that the entire system is versioned together, which can let you almost completely eliminate version dependency hell. You can customize all of your tools to understand the rules for your new system. It's a huge undertaking, but it pays off because you've got a hundred thousand software engineers.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  > There aren't really any off the shelf monorepo options that scale super well How can you say this when Perforce on a single machine took Google to absolutely terrifying scale? There is no chance that your mid-sized software company will even slightly tax the abilities of Perforce. What I believe you meant was there aren't really any good options to make git tolerable for non-trivial projects, and with that I wholeheartedly agree. And that's why these threads are so tiresome: they always boil down to people talking about what git can and cannot do.
  - sanderjd 4y ago
    The Linux kernel seems pretty non trivial...
    - jeffbee 4y ago
      Google3 is no joke 1000x larger than Linux.
thundergolfer 4y ago
It's awkwardly phrased, yes, but what the author is saying is that Google-tier scale companies will have an awful time migrating from poly to mono-repo, and a not fun time being mono-repo for the first few years. For company's not at this tier, it isn't that hard to migrate to a monorepo and the benefits will be more immediate because the tools (eg. git) won't be screaming under the load. (My personal 2c is that you can be well below Google-scale and still hit the limits of the common tooling when using monorepos. Canva, Stripe, and Twitter are examples)

''I am here to tell you: if you are running a software business and you aren't at, like, Google-tier scale, just throw it all in a monorepo.'' Google _is_ a monorepo

BoorishBears 4y ago

It really paints a picture of the authors credentials to be making this declaration. All signs for the rest of the world point to the opposite conclusion: unless you're Google-scale, you don't have Google level resources. Google has more engineers working on developer experience than most companies will ever have period. And monorepos work best when workflows are carefully thought out with clever application specific tooling. - I think the author is probably working on a 1-10 developer project (and I'm leaning towards 1) and has confused the convenience with having things in reach when the entire system fits in your mind with the general benefits of a monorepo. I also wonder if they read any of the letters they linked too...

dastbe 4y ago
> All signs for the rest of the world point to the opposite conclusion: unless you're Google-scale, you don't have Google level resources. Google has more engineers working on developer experience than most companies will ever have period. I feel like this was true ~5 years ago, but these days the tooling around scaling monorepos is safely supporting O(100) developers without a lot of overhead. > And monorepos work best when workflows are carefully thought out with clever application specific tooling. I don't see any meaningful distinction with how well thought out workflows need to be between mono and polyrepo.
- BoorishBears 4y ago
  > I don't see any meaningful distinction with how well thought out workflows need to be between mono and polyrepo. You completely failed to parse the sentence. The point being made isn't "well thought workflows are only for monorepos", that applies to the "needing clever application specific tooling" part. Vendoring/Versioning for discrete packages is a heavily invested in problem space for most tech stacks you'll come across. But if you build a monorepo and don't end up with a build system that takes on those responsibilities you end something that doesn't scale to even moderately large interconnected components. OP has such a tiny project that I'm not convinced they're even dealing with dependencies in a traditional sense. But well before you get to Google scale, you'll run into situations where you just want to change one thing and don't want to change every single downstream dependency which normally would have been isolated via a discrete package that doesn't have to change in lockstep. And then that exact same pain starts to exist for deployments and needs to be worked around. > I feel like this was true ~5 years ago, but these days the tooling around scaling monorepos is safely supporting O(100) developers without a lot of overhead. Nothing about the above has changed in the last 5 years, it's kind of the ground truth of monorepos via multiple repos: You're the first person I've ever seen imply monorepos don't offload complexity to tooling, even amongst proponents.
  - dastbe 4y ago
    > Vendoring/Versioning for discrete packages is a heavily invested in problem space for most tech stacks you'll come across. 100% disagree. The problem of "How do I define my dependencies and have a package manager reify that into a concrete set of versioned dependencies" may be a solved problem, but the tools for tracking dependencies across many repos and driving upgrades is neolithic. About the only company I've seen that does this well is Amazon, and they have yet to sell us version sets as a service. > OP has such a tiny project that I'm not convinced they're even dealing with dependencies in a traditional sense. But well before you get to Google scale, you'll run into situations where you just want to change one thing and don't want to change every single downstream dependency which normally would have been isolated via a discrete package that doesn't have to change in lockstep. And then that exact same pain starts to exist for deployments and needs to be worked around. As I alluded to above, the dual of this is that getting everyone to update their dependencies is orders of magnitude more difficult when you have a polyrepo setup, even if we're working under the ideal situation where repo setup is standardize to such a degree that a person can parachute into a repo and become effective within minutes. > Nothing about the above has changed in the last 5 years, it's kind of the ground truth of monorepos via multiple repos: You're the first person I've ever seen imply monorepos don't offload complexity to tooling, even amongst proponents. Both polyrepo and monorepo have complexity in scaling that is handled by their tooling. The difference historically is that OSS polyrepo tooling has been better and better integrated because that's just how most things are built in any language, but that has been improving over the past ~half decade * Bazel maintenance complexity has dropped precipitously, and many of the initial bottlenecks you hit with it have been solved in OSS. * If you're anti-bazel, gradle and cargo monorepo support is decently good. I believe the same is true in js these days, but I don't have hands-on experience * Services for managing monorepos like sourcegraph for codesearch or mergify for submit queue now exist that make it easy to adopt the patterns that work well at large companies. * Microsoft and others have invested in git to improve scalability of developing against large repos. * you have OSS tools like git-branchless that further improve the experience of working in a monorepo There are a bunch of companies in the O(100) - O(1000) developer range that are using this stuff and it works very well.
  - tylerhou 4y ago
    > But well before you get to Google scale, ... doesn't have to change in lockstep. Not updating dependencies is the equivalent of never brushing your teeth. Yes, you can ship code faster in the short term, but version skew will be a huge pain in the future. A little maintenance every day is preferable to ten root canals in a few years.

CobrastanJorji 4y ago

Yes, absolutely. Nonetheless, I think the author may be right, except that by "Google" they mean "large." This is a fundamental misunderstanding of just how large Google and its peers are. I think it's more interesting to consider three sizes. If you're small, everything will fit nicely in a monorepo. If you're large, you'll want lots of repos. There aren't really any off the shelf monorepo options that scale super well, so using a bunch of small repos is a great way to deal with the problem. Plus, you probably don't have a full time staff babysitting the source repos, so you want some isolation. If someone in another org is breaking stuff left and right, you don't want the other orgs to be affected. If you're GIGANTIC, monorepos are a pretty great option again. You'll probably have to build your own and then have a full time group of people maintain it, but that's not a huge problem for you because you're a gigantic tech company. You can set up an elaborate build system that takes advantage of the fact that the entire system is versioned together, which can let you almost completely eliminate version dependency hell. You can customize all of your tools to understand the rules for your new system. It's a huge undertaking, but it pays off because you've got a hundred thousand software engineers.

jeffbee 4y ago
> There aren't really any off the shelf monorepo options that scale super well How can you say this when Perforce on a single machine took Google to absolutely terrifying scale? There is no chance that your mid-sized software company will even slightly tax the abilities of Perforce. What I believe you meant was there aren't really any good options to make git tolerable for non-trivial projects, and with that I wholeheartedly agree. And that's why these threads are so tiresome: they always boil down to people talking about what git can and cannot do.
- sanderjd 4y ago
  The Linux kernel seems pretty non trivial...
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    Google3 is no joke 1000x larger than Linux.

thundergolfer 4y ago

It's awkwardly phrased, yes, but what the author is saying is that Google-tier scale companies will have an awful time migrating from poly to mono-repo, and a not fun time being mono-repo for the first few years. For company's not at this tier, it isn't that hard to migrate to a monorepo and the benefits will be more immediate because the tools (eg. git) won't be screaming under the load. (My personal 2c is that you can be well below Google-scale and still hit the limits of the common tooling when using monorepos. Canva, Stripe, and Twitter are examples)