5 ms·

Microservices are essential at any large company. Can you imagine if Facebook was still a PHP monolith? They'd need 5,000,000 instances to run the app.

• DerArzt 3y ago
  > microservices are essential at any large company There in lies the rub, the majority of engineers don't work at companies that need the kind of scale that Facebook has. The majority of us work at smaller shops that can get by fine without all the overhead that microservices introduce. The problem that I see is that there are to many folks not weighing the pros and cons of the architectural decisions they are making, and are just joining the cargo cult.
• LeBit 3y ago
  People went full monoliths to full microservices. The same people are now saying creating microservices is a sign of incompetence and the smart thing to do is create monoliths. But not to sound ridiculous, they bring a spin to it: they now say they create modules within the monolith. Software engineering is like fashion. It goes full circle every X years.
  • lightbendover 3y ago
    Meanwhile, the experienced/good/non-charlatan engineers endorse choosing the right architecture for the job. Building a CMS? You probably want a pretty large monolith. Also building an analytics platform? That should probably be a separate service aligned to a different team.
  • thewix 3y ago
    It should be: start with a well architected monolith, and then slice things into microservices when you need to. Fowler and many Microservice evangelists even say to start with a monolith first, because you don't know the correct slices at the beginning. EDIT: I suck at writing coherent messages on my phone.
• x86x87 3y ago
  narrator: they aren't. Code modularity is important.
• activitypea 3y ago
  That's... not how it works.... If that were true, then moving to a microservice architecture they'd need 5 million instances of the microservice that replaces the part of the monolith that required 5 million instances in the first place, plus a couple of millies for all the other services.
• lightbendover 3y ago
  At a large company? Yes. On a small-medium vertical team at a large company? Probably-maybe not. Many, many engineers (and managers maybe even more so) immediately jump to micro-services (often resume-driven development) where most companies have poor tooling and poor security knowledge that turn them into a living productivity-crippling nightmare to work with.
  • webdood90 3y ago
    so then you're saying it's an execution issue, not a flawed concept. a lot of people are giving Martin flack that the idea sucks when the reality is they're implementing it poorly or inappropriately.
    • stavros 3y ago
      I'm tired of this cop-out. If your thing is extremely easy to implement poorly, to the point where good implementations are a small minority, your thing sucks and is bad.
      • lightbendover 3y ago
        Additionally if you don't call-out the gotchas/pitfalls, then you're misleading the large chunk of engineers/managers who find a blog post and then blindly follow the best practice.
• rqtwteye 3y ago
  It depends on the granularity. I see projects where 3 developers create 13 micro services. Basically they buy all the complexity without having any benefits. I generally hate the term “micro services”. They are just “services” and nothing new.