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My team owns an API monolith that hosts several completely unrelated endpoints. I keep thinking this would be a good candidate for breaking into microservices,

by cglong 3y ago

My team owns an API monolith that hosts several completely unrelated endpoints. I keep thinking this would be a good candidate for breaking into microservices, but I do wonder if I'm buying into the hype.

Smaug123 3y ago
Massive architectural refactors are so attractive (at least to the kind of mind that likes Factorio) and so expensive. At least make sure you've got some concrete benefits that you think might arise from breaking apart the monolith, so you can do some semblance of a cost-benefit analysis!
bottlepalm 3y ago
You are. People like you nuked all productivity we had at my last company.
- cglong 3y ago
  Well, I've been sitting on this thought for two years now, so they probably weren't exactly like me :)
adql 3y ago
That is probably the best use case for microservices (althought I'd just call them "services" at that part). That assuming they are big enough to warrant that in the first place. IMO if it is a dozen unrelated endpoints but all of that still takes less than dev/month to manage it's probably entirely wasted effort to "fix it" And if any of them grows to warrant dev/month or more.... separate that one and only that one out of that.
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
When you say unrelated, are you sure? Do they share -- or should they share -- a common underlying relational data model? My biggest grief with microservices is the fact that it's effectively become a war on having a coherent logical normalized relational data model inside an organization.
- cglong 3y ago
  This is a good question to think about. Right now, they don't have any relationship beyond serving different parts of my group, but perhaps they could be redesigned in a more cohesive way.
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    The core pessimal problem presented by microservices is this: someday some stakeholder is going to ask for some information to be joined together or interlinked -- and that information will have been unwisely put into separate services ... and now you'll be doing joins manually via web service calls -- over the network -- and somewhere the ghost of E.F. Codd is spinning in circles and cursing you. I think it's actually quite rare for companies to have data so actually autonomous and unrelated that it does not logically relate to anything else in the organization.

by cglong 3y ago

Smaug123 3y ago

Massive architectural refactors are so attractive (at least to the kind of mind that likes Factorio) and so expensive. At least make sure you've got some concrete benefits that you think might arise from breaking apart the monolith, so you can do some semblance of a cost-benefit analysis!

bottlepalm 3y ago

You are. People like you nuked all productivity we had at my last company.

cglong 3y ago
Well, I've been sitting on this thought for two years now, so they probably weren't exactly like me :)

adql 3y ago

That is probably the best use case for microservices (althought I'd just call them "services" at that part). That assuming they are big enough to warrant that in the first place. IMO if it is a dozen unrelated endpoints but all of that still takes less than dev/month to manage it's probably entirely wasted effort to "fix it" And if any of them grows to warrant dev/month or more.... separate that one and only that one out of that.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago

When you say unrelated, are you sure? Do they share -- or should they share -- a common underlying relational data model? My biggest grief with microservices is the fact that it's effectively become a war on having a coherent logical normalized relational data model inside an organization.

cglong 3y ago
This is a good question to think about. Right now, they don't have any relationship beyond serving different parts of my group, but perhaps they could be redesigned in a more cohesive way.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  The core pessimal problem presented by microservices is this: someday some stakeholder is going to ask for some information to be joined together or interlinked -- and that information will have been unwisely put into separate services ... and now you'll be doing joins manually via web service calls -- over the network -- and somewhere the ghost of E.F. Codd is spinning in circles and cursing you. I think it's actually quite rare for companies to have data so actually autonomous and unrelated that it does not logically relate to anything else in the organization.